Yeah, I too am in the camp of less is more. I'm not feelin' this at all.
The first cardinal rule about collages is to have the subject matter be of the same art style. Otherwise it looks really cheap and kitchy. Though these are all sprite art, you have a mix of way different styles. Some from the 8-bit era, some from 16...some from arcade that has a much higher color count.
It does look like a mismash of stuff.
The second cardinal rule for making a successful collage is to have a "flow", a composition of all the subject matter so that it leads the eye and has clarity of what in the collage. This doesn't have that. It's all a blob here, so much noise, zero negative space for getting clarity of silhouettes, and even the placements of each character doesn't really make any visual sense. You got that huge wiley bot in the middle of the image, and a bunch of smaller charcters tucked around it playing peek-a-boo.
Also, what's going on with the pixel stretching? Is that a product of the preview, or are these sprites deformed in some way that is causing most of the sprites to have non-squared pixels? I see rectangular pixels mixed in everywhere and it's making the sprite art look really ugly.
Lastly, I'm just wondering...if you're a 30 year graphic designer, why would you pay someone on etsy to cut out sprites for you? All these sprites are readily available online, and a lot of them are available in sprite sheet format, so all you got to do is remove the background color (which is usually pink) and you have your isolated character art. Also, as a graphic designer, where is your color theory and color contrasting? Yellow background with a slightly faded pacman maze texture, behind a mostly warm collage/clumping of characters... that's warm on warm colors. (not to mention the pacman maze texture is flat and way too subtle -- and way too small/repeated).
I dunno man, I'm calling shinanigans on that 30 year graphic designer comment. I'm trying to be as constructive as I can here, but to be honest, this is looking really rough. Fun or no fun...I would expect a lot more for a graphic designer with that amount of tenure.