Now that's what I'm talkin' about! "reluctantly" ? "nothing to look at" ?? I think it looks cool! Definitely haven't seen a pond like that before. Pond in a retaining wall! I also like the idea of the upper pre-formed pond spilling into the lower pond. I want to do something like that so that I can grow water filtering plants in the auxiliary pond. This way the koi don't eat it up as they tend to do
Do you plan to keep the pond long term? I know of a few other people who inherited there pond and tried it out for a season before they decided to shut it down. Often times it was because the pond wasn't built the way they would have liked it and they couldn't get into the maintenance routine. It seems like yours is fairly low maintenance though.
I ended up giving away most of my baby koi from last year. My pond can't sustain that high a bio load and my koi are now old enough that they spawn every year! I did keep some of the nicer babies though.