The artwork is great. If you want to strip out all the descriptions and artwork, why not just go back to playing Hunt The Wumpus? As for being "distracting", well, magic items are supposed to be. My characters tend to be more greedy than cautious, and the world as it appears seems well suited to their psychology.
I don't think it should really be that hard to make everything line up. You just say that every item gets one of a few possible tile representations, chosen to be appropriate for what it is, and every tile has a text description, a console representation, and a corresponding whatever-it-is-they-put-on-your-character-icon. If you randomly roll up an rN+ rC+ robe, you pick a random tile from a pool skewed toward blue (for cold) and black (for negative). On console you would still get some kind of clue from the color it appeared, so any advantage from this stylistic touch would be relatively similar in both formats. If that tile looks like it's encircled by a bunch of feather boas, its description might be "distressingly furry". If that tile is really really black, then it's "ominously black". To be sure, by "tile" here I mean simply the text name/numeric identifier/whatever of the tile, not the graphic image itself; but that can then be used to look up the graphic image if you're playing tiles.