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Could I have opinions about which of these is a better flag?
 
What are the colors meant to represent?

simplisticly the sky, nature/plants, rescources/gold in the first one. While in the second one the sky is replaced by blood/dawn. There is more nuanced/symbolic meanings to it/them too but I will not say those as that would be spoiling it (not that it is very important not to spoil but I wish to keep it secret for now.)
 
Would it not be better to have the orange go diagonally replacing Northern Ireland's cross? I would think a good point of departure would be if Queen Anne became queen of the Netherlands forming some kind of personal union?
An orange saltire doesn't feature anywhere in Dutch national heraldry though so it wouldn't really represent them. The base flag is the pre-1801 Union Flag too, before Ireland was assimilated into the UK, so with a PoD before 1801 there'd be no St Patrick's Cross to replace. Also, the proportions of the pre-1801 flag were more often 3:5-ish than 1:2-ish for land use, the longer version was only used at sea IIRC? Certainly, even now the British Army officially still uses a 3:5 Union Flag even though 1:2 have become the official proportions.

That said, I like @cres 's idea and yours so I mocked one up. I also did one replacing the blue of the Scottish flag with the Dutch tricolour, and also using a gyronny pattern like their current naval ensign (which, admittedly, was created in 1931) to see if I liked them more, but I don't think they work as well personally.
Anglo-Dutch-sketch.png
 
With a pre-1801 POD, the orange-white-blue Prince's Flag might be a better basis than the modern red-white-blue. As such, I'd replace the upper band of blue field on the great union flag with orange. Basically it'd be @Battlestar_Cydonia 's second design above, but with orange instead of red.
 
With a pre-1801 POD, the orange-white-blue Prince's Flag might be a better basis than the modern red-white-blue. As such, I'd replace the upper band of blue field on the great union flag with orange. Basically it'd be @Battlestar_Cydonia 's second design above, but with orange instead of red.
Like so:
Anglo-Dutch-sketch2.png


It certainly works better IMHO than having the same red across the top as is used in the St George's Cross. Though while reading up on older Dutch flags I found that they actually changed orange to red far earlier than I'd thought. Certainly for the Dutch navy, it seems that the Prince's Flag was the only one in use up to 1630-ish, then there was a period where it and the current national flag (State Flag a.k.a. Statenvlag) vied against each other, before the State Flag became universal in the 1660s. Dutch Wikipedia also claims the flag was changed in order to curry favour with Cromwell's republic in England, as the House of Stuart apparently also used orange as a house colour, just like the House of Orange-Nassau. But this doesn't tally with a change-over beginning in 1630, 18 years before the English Civil War began.

I suspect that the reason for the change is really far more prosaic. Certainly with the Union Flag, the Royal Navy tended to have theirs made using much darker dyes than the Army etc. preferred because their flags bleached out faster in the wet, salty, windy environment at sea. I suspect as the Dutch kept a similar eye on their finances that the same tendency arose there too, but starting from a much lighter base than the Union Flag does it rapidly diverged into two officially separate designs. The Prince's Flag also has a much lighter shade of blue than the State Flag, after all. Then following the Navy's change it also began to supplant the Prince's Flag on VOC ships and on land.

But I'm rambling a bit. It's still early in the morning for me, haven't woken up properly yet!
 
I suppose I should post it here too. An alternate flag of Brazil:

View attachment 555258
The Empire of Brazil would become a republic in 1889 under the name "Republic of the United States of Brazil". There were several different black-red-white or green-yellow designs to replace the Imperial Flag. The design that was eventually chosen included all five colours. The colours of the tricolour represented the three principal ethnic groups of Brazil. Red being the native Indians, white the European settlers and immigrants and black the Africans. The flag also featured a green Portuguese Cross and a golden armillary sphere. Both (except for the colour of the cross) being symbols both the Portuguese Empire and the Brazilian Empire were included in the flag as a sort symbolism of continuity. This way black-red-white and green-yellow were both featured on the flag.
(I was going to leave the cross red but did not work well)
(This is separate from my timeline-in-progress, just for the contest)
 
A flag of a Independent Dutch Guyana, in a TL where Britain never took back Guyana and Dutch Guyana covers OTLs British Guyana and Suriname.

dutch guyana flag.png
 
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