I was taught that the “internal conflict” in synthesizing your skills is what makes you an artist. There’s room for it all. Some projects deserve old-world craftsmanship. Some projects let you be Andy Warhol. 
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@clk75201 thank you for the input, things are a bit crazy at work so unfortunately, I’ll have to be brief in this post. If your in my class on Saturday, or up at the space, I’ll have a nice piece of work that was laser darkened. @Webdevel is correct, it won’t give you depth, however the laser etch could give you a “paint by numbers” type of design if you wanted to emboss it. You could mark out your lines and then go over them with the embossing tool. If you look at the begining of the thread the MakerSpace symbol is lightly lasered etched in the stitching guide.
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I’m in the same boat here, but the whole idea of so much detail and doing it quickly has an appeal all on its own.
Here are three different book covers I did using the same starting pattern. This’ll give you some idea of the tradeoffs of using the laser for cutting details.
The first one is hand-cut using a swivel knife and then hand-tooled:
The second was cut and etched on the laser, then hand tooled:
The third one was also cut and etched on the laser, with minimal hand-tooling (mostly to define the letters and the background).
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These look great! Would love to see them in person.
I have the last two: the one with silver one it (an antique silver shield from an old saddle) is my wife’s. The last one is my Maker book.
I can bring them with me this weekend. Taking a Friday (tonight) 9:30 pm class and a Saturday 10-3 carving class.
The first one I gave away as a present and it now resides in Alabama.
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I agree with the guys, that’s a large format stamp and most likely a hot stamp that was either foiled or inked by the look of the depth and clarity of the impression and coloration.
My concern would be how well a lasered image would hold up over time considering the type of rubbing wear it would get.