In my opinion, you have the better of the two. I also own the old tone edition, with the newer face plate. I have spoken with Rusty at Tesoro twice now about the golden and he prefers the old tone set up too. The new tone order would drive me nuts. The old tones are in their proper conductive order. The one any only complaint about the old tone version that has some truth to it is the two middle tones are kind of close together, but after a bit of practice and hunting you get used to it and can recognize the difference between them, if I get confused, I scan a nickel to remind me what the lower middle tone sounds like.
The Beauty of this machine is the notch width/tone adjust nob. When the notch is off, you can change how those middle tones sound on specific things like a nickel, a particular style pull tab, or gold ring, or even foil. You have already discovered that by turning the nob all the way to the right, foil will drop to the iron tone (but so will very light gold, like a small chain).
It is true that you will loose some depth by turning the disc up even to the recommended setting, at the arrow. But when you have tones, why would you do that? With Ed 120, you can keep the disc set to the lowest setting and still miss a lot of small iron, and properly I'd the bigger iron. But if you get tired of that, you can turn the notch on, and still keep depth on the higher conductors.
The golden is not a deep machine, but occasionally I will hit a 7 or 8 inch pulltab. It will hit a quarter at 7 inches with good ground conditions, and I have found dimes at 5 inches.
You should give your new golden a chance before letting it go so quickly.
