Got to see this in person the other day, and speaking just as an observer, the whole arrangement looks like trying to improve on what was previously there with constraints from what's still there.
The first thing that hit me was how tremendously low animation the whole ride is. Easily the most kinetic element (to me, anyway) is having all the pirate ship vehicles dangling from the ceiling. The scenes themselves are fairly static; by extension, so is the tribe scene.
As far as that goes, first off... I don't remember figures in any of the "islands" being quite as large as these are. That surprised me, but it's been ages since I've been on this ride, so that may just be me.
But the scene's animation, or lack thereof... I'm not sure how much of an improvement they could have done with scene selection while getting a decent representation of movement with the ride's overall (mostly static) animation style. Either because they were retrofitting existing mechanisms or because they chose to keep the scene relatively low kinetics in keeping with the rest of the ride, there's really not too much they could use here to get a good representation of Fancy Shawl. If you count the drummers as a single mechanism (hey, maybe), that's a grand total of two elements in the whole scene for them to play with.
Since they went with drum beats for the audio there, animating striking the drum seems like a no-brainer. That leaves them one more mechanism, and I can't imagine they'd want a completely static Tiger Lily after the previous version of this scene.
Ribbons would have been great, but I wonder how long it would take for them to start looking like strips cut from a Swiffer duster. (Proactive maintenance on these classic dark rides... ain't.) Adding animation for Tiger Lily's arms and legs to really show off the dance would've been a lot more movement than any other scene in this ride has. They could've had a (slow) animation in the shoulders to move the arms, but for whatever reason, they came up with a turntable to have her whole body move while keeping her joints static.
I can't defend it, except to say that if the whole ride sucks for movement, additions would need to suck, too, just to fit in. Beyond that, if it has to fit the constraints of the ride, what's there looks better to me than what was there previously.
