I think this is maybe what's going on. There are pragmatic choices that make things easier for us, but every element will have an emotional context as well.

It's odd, when I was looking at that aikido ad, I thought I could faintly smell newsprint paper...

Yeah, same here. Also I interpret it as a already well-established place, something that has been successfully run for a while. The other one screams "Hi, we are a new institution" which gives me a wary response. It just misses some smiling stockphoto woman.

There must be a lot of testing and research in "cheap looking" ads, this might be a great example of the resulting emotional responses.