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One thing I would probably wouldn't take inspiration from other games, though, is how you use interpolation in your terrain generation. I see for certain in the desert aerial shot, and perhaps in others, lots of parts where the terrain curvature goes back/forth and left/right on a regular interval, instead of flowing at whatever angle they look like they're trying to. This is a visually significant holdback, but it's also very easy to identify the cause. Two simple ways to make your terrain look better than Minecraft, in its worst ways, are not to use Perlin noise (at least without domain rotation to address its directional bias), and not to use linear interpolation to reduce noise evaluations (if your terrain formula is fixed with just variable biome depth/scale parameters -- edit: or you never blend between two biomes, you can easily conditionally skip low amplitude octaves which won't affect the final result as an alternative way to evaluate 3D noise less often).
For example, in this Notch article, he discussed using trilinear interpolation to speed up noise evaluation as well as to smooth out rough parts. But I tested, and both of his problems actually came mostly from using too many noise octaves. Minecraft used 16 octaves for each noise channel, and 8 octaves for the blending noise, when just 5-6 and 2-3 would be enough. The rest of the speed problems could be solved by implementing something to skip noise evaluations when they wouldn't matter, at least above/below max/min biome height if not dynamic octave skipping. See this screenshot difference.