⇛Marnetmar⇛

The simple thing is that the first three are letting the beauty of custom textures shine. The last one is using (mostly) vanilla resources, or derivatives of them. Take that first scene and use vanilla textures. Hello 1997~ish era mapping.

Honestly though, that first screenshot (competently) rendered in stock textures would still look a lot more pleasing to me than the last shot.

They all look nice. I've noticed using gritty textures makes an area look more detailed even if it's actually somewhat basic.