I appreciate your praise for my work. My process was actually pretty simple: I made a base panel in Blender, joined it to a small armature, and then parented each necessary part to its respective joint: 'Background', 'Panel', 'Symbol', 'Face', and 'Eyes'. Further, I sized it so that each eventual pixel in the finished piece was .1 units in Blender, giving me a scale to work from.
After modeling out the symbols and faces, using the SNES artwork as a guide, I just screenshot each panel and let a macro in Photoshop handle each piece, which ended up pasted into the finished sheet.
I used the same technique to create both the bonus markers and the '3D' garbage blocks shown earlier in the thread. Except in the latter case, I also had to get the various bits of artwork from Tetris Attack itself in a cohesive whole. That's how I figured out the pattern they used to build with, leading to the impossible block (TA caps at x12 thickness) constructed in the 3D set. The garbage block set I called 'GBC', though, was a straight 2D edit of the SNES artwork to try bringing it more in line with the 3-color scheme.
I still have those models, so if this were to go onto, say, the Wii, as a fully-3D version, it would be possible. I'd just have to knock the triangle counts down a little bit, and probably just model out the various garbage blocks to make it easier to deal with.
Now that my explanation's out of the way, have you researched the fall speed of panels at the various difficulty levels? I'd do it, but ZSNES apparently 'increases frame' at 30 FPS rather than 60 (if done on a flashing match, the flash doesn't change between frame increases), meaning I can't get accurate data. If this has been documented anywhere, though, it would be useful to have to make this version much more accurate.