Like I said earlier, it looks westernlike. I might ski there over my spring break if I visit McGill University in Montreal.
The whole first tracks thing makes sense now. Steamboat charged $35 a person, but limited sales. Tremblant charges less than half, so in return, you get less benefit. Like you said, most of them just went in the summit lodge for a cappuccino anyway. Haha, that's rich people that can't ski well for ya. By the time I would go, first tracks would be done for the season, so not a factor.
That picture of the village is actually the fake homogenized one that Intrawest put up? Looks a lot like an outlet mall to me. I've been to Steamboat and Stratton and their villages all look exactly the same. They wanted to do the same thing at Mountain Creek when they owned it, but failed miserably.
The presence of a fake homogenized base village only annoys me when it makes all the parking lots require a bus, which is always a pain. Looks like you can still park close to the lift at Tremblant by parking at the Porte De Soleil lift or the North Side, just like Stratton where you can park at the Sun Bowl. At Steamboat, there is no way to park close to the lift without paying, but it isn't as much as Vail charges for parking. That didn't matter because our hotel had a shuttle, so we didn't have to park.
I've lived in New York my entire life.