Xmetal, I don't think it's necessarily a "lazy" thing. Sure, if you or me designed the same deck, people would likely overlook it, but it doesn't mean a simple design doesn't have a place in the market. It's not just a lazy design, it's a design that because of its simple nature needs a big company behind it to be successful. They are, in a way, the only ones who can make such a design possible, as you and I couldn't print it even if we really wanted to.
(I'm not saying they're not doing it for money. But the deck is still a very nice one that is, in my opinion, worth printing regardless.)
Now, nobody ever says anything about official USPCC decks, yet in terms of originality they could be considered worse than even Merz decks... How many decks have they released that were PURELY recolorations in every single aspect? 
Most of the color variants weren't actually USPC's work, but were instead contracted jobs from other companies. BMPokerWorld commissioned the brown Rider Back deck, maroon/burgundy and yellow were commissioned by the Bond Agency, and green, orange, gold, silver, turquoise and fuschia were made for Vincenzo DiFatta (who also made the rainbow Rider Back).
USPC only made red, blue and black, with black being the more scarce and also the only color of their own choosing not yet released in a printing from Erlanger or a "Standard" box - they're still selling Cincinnati-made decks only.
You can call it a lack of originality, but remember these decks were so early in the custom deck craze, just color variants were considered pretty out-there. Think of it like this: a rockabilly song written today doesn't sound terribly original, since the format's been around a number of decades, but if it was the early 1950s, it would be truly original. The Ramones were considered great because of the utter simplicity of their music, which was unique for its time - any band trying to replicate that today without being called dated Ramones clones would fail miserably.
Man's gotta walk before he can run, crawl before he can walk. Sentinels and Infinity wouldn't have been possible without decks like those leading the way in the beginning. The earliest Ellusionist decks were straight-up variations of the basic Rider Back, a trend that continued up to Arcane, which is only what, a little more than a year old? Now, I don't think they'd ever go back to Rider variants - been there, done that, bought the brick box. But before Arcane, Infinity, Artifice and LTD could come to be, those Rider Back-based models had to come before.
