most of the problems it causes (for me) are related to the introduction of "new" tiles that have no equivalent in the vanilla tileset, more specifically, in the farm tileset, floor tiles 76, 77, 79 and 80, which appears in Culta17.
the problem arises when i, with vanilla data, try to load someone's bug report save with their modified data, and hit a wall, because they're incompatible, also i notice MANY of the tilesets (like the stables) we know and love have been removed for whatever reason.
the DESERT01 tileset is a "landing zone", and should be flat, not a pyramid, this caused me problems in the original as well as in openXCom.
going over the patch notes... it seems like you may have had a modified set of CULTA/DESERT data from the outset, because i can't see any mention of replacing any existing tilesets. this makes me suspect XcomUtil as the source of our woes, as i'm fairly certain that had some replacement tilesets for those 2 specific map sets.