The title of this thread is: Help me make Lakehome less blah

Which is quite a distinct thing from issues such as scale and density. Even though it's been a few months, since you created this thread, dimensiondust, I would still inquire of you what about this map of yours, in its current form, induces a sensation of blah in you?

This map is colorful, and it has a number of nice colors incorporated into it. Yet, it feels unfinished, and this is largely due to the large expanses of empty space, upon both land and water, relative to the amount of space that you've already populated with objects or places.

There's no people, no animals, and the vegetation that does appear comes across as not being of the growing wild variety. This yields a rather unnatural look to the map.

What are the yellow objects? Farms? Crops? Buildings? Since I don't know, and since it isn't obvious to me, I ask. At first, I thought they were building, and then I thought that they may be wheat or hay growing, some kind of crops.

Some smaller well-trod paths between various buildings and places would seem to me to be a good fit. Human beings invariably end up taking short cuts, thereby creating their own paths in addition to roads and formal paths. From the doors of houses and other buildings to wherever the inhabitants would frequently travel to.

The scene depicted appears as flat, featureless land. No hills, no mountains, no valleys, not even a woods edge to disappear into. And the river transitions seamlessly into a larger body of water. Why so seamless?

The small red tents on the right appear to be identical to the larger red tents on the left, only smaller in size and turned in a different direction, rather than them being individual items plotted one at a time.

It really isn't so much a matter of the map being blah, as it is that you started off well, but then seemed to run out of steam. That much water, but no one fishing. Nobody swimming. Minimal human activity in a location that would likely see human activity flourish, even recreational activity, if nothing else.

The map doesn't really allow me to zoom in on it, after clicking on it. A pity.