Thanks for the kind reply! By Topo you are refering to the hill shade, not the contour lines, correct? I make my topography in VP Planet generator, a fractal tool. Then I erode it in Wilbur. The hillshade is made in gimp using the bump map function. This is a very rough outline of the process. I have played around with various setting of the hillshade, with more or less detail and stronger shadows. For my next interaction I will increase the effect as you suggested.
Hope this answers your question, the DEMs are basically generated/eroded by an algorithm. But there's a lot of manual control in the process.