Hi Rand, thanks for taking the time to reply, and give your examples. I appreciate the old tool is most likely outdated pullling on old stats, and of course there is a need for forward development.

I’ve run some more keyword tests and am seeing for the most part a lot closer difficulty score between the two tools now, so am feeling slightly less nervy about solely relying on the new kw tool.

I’ll give you the example of mine which I gave to the Moz help team some months ago when I was consistently seeing bigger differences in the two tools numbers. 'constitutional homeopathic remedies' - the new keyword Explorer gave a Difficulty of 6, whereas the old Keyword tool shows difficulty at 22%.  6 with DA’s of 40’s and 50’s in the SERPs just didn’t seem to add up. and I was seeing lower scores for many many keywords, all of which looked way more difficult to rank for. (even this example checked again now is a ‘slightly better’ “gap” at 15 new kw explorer tool vs 23% old)

other keywords checked now for reference:

• late menopause benefits - old tool 45%, KW explorer 40
• decorating a holiday home - old tool  25%, KW explorer 25
• tree pruning - old tool 58%, KW explorer 64

So it seems like there’s more similarity than difference now (maybe the tool has been worked on some more) and possibly I just need to get used to the wider spread of numbers in some cases. I’m certainly a lot more confident seeing what I’m seeing now.

As an aside, feedback while I’m here!… the old SERP view graphic was a LOT easier to read at a glance with the DA / PA scores for each of the top10, vs the new tool list view