The funny thing is that for a lot of us it isn't exactly "huge and ugly", it certainly looks worse than the "best and latest" but for those that started playing dwarf fortress when there were barely any tileset, even the phoebus or ironhand tilesets were a revolution when they were first released.
The next big thing was "text will be text" because it allowed tilesets to really go all out on the textures because it would no longer affect the text.
Various people including Meph worked year after year to make things better and better looking, and one of the latest examples is what Vordak made.
For the "huge", you always have the option of zooming out or picking a smaller, but I guess the core is that most people play dwarf fortress (and masterwork) for the gameplay first, tileset help to understand what everything is and it's obviously a plus when it looks good but it is more like good looking icing on a great cake.
That being said, vanilla already has plenty of content, and LNP includes most of the third party tools you would want, so as long as you don't specifically want masterwork's content it is not a bad idea to pick vanilla (through LNP) with the reason that it looks better.
Like you said on the other topic you are new to DF, so it's likely that you still have a lot to discover with vanilla DF, and in a few months (and quite a few forts) you might decide that you want a change, through masterwork or other mods/packs, enough to not mind the simpler tilesets (or maybe new tilesets will have reached mods at that point, this new type of tileset is still very new after all).
