I think the main problem with the original is that it is a very unfamiliar type of chart to most of us. It took me quite a while to make sense of it, but the meaning of it now stands out clearly to me when I look at it.
I'm not usually a fan of pie charts, but in this case, I do like Michael's Pie charts. I'd personally remove a lot of the "noise" - lines, borders, background color, shiny effects on the pie, legends, and so on. I'd also use a pale red and green for our traditional associations with good and bad, with enough contrast between the two for people with color blindness to still make sense of it.
A problem with the pie charts in this case is that while you get a good idea, say, that there were a lot more crew than 3rd class passengers, it's really hard to tell how many more since we're being asked to mentally add up two different areas of two pie shapes, and then compare the two total areas. That's simply not something the human mind does well. You can see, for instance, how much simpler this task is in the original chart since these totals are indicated by much more easily-compared line lengths.
So to go heavily against the flow here, I feel that the first chart actually presents the most information the most clearly, and allows for the greatest understanding of the numbers. Other charts that have been presented do a better job of demonstrating certain aspects of the numbers, but I don't feel that any of them have better presented the entire picture.
One reason we may be looking at it with such disfavor is that we're so used to being able to do further analysis. Want to see that pie chart of female crew that is just a dot in Michael's chart? Just click on it. Want to combine male and female passengers for an analysis? Just remove it as a dimension. But I assume the context of the original is that it is a single, static chart intended to convey the most information as clearly as possible. In that, I personally feel that it is a great success.
(Edit: I'd further simplify the original chart by removing the legends. There's no need to say "Class" or "Sex" when it is obvious from the values, and the only reason "Survived" is necessary is because it was put in terms of Yes/No instead of Lived/Died. I'd also remove the black border. And the little grey bar below each legend on the left is complete fluff and should be removed.)
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