Sometimes getting things to stand out more means just changing the colour or line thickness a little (or font size for text). An outer glow of some kind can help, but it can also make things look too misty, which I think it what's happening with some of the smaller text labels presently. I'm not sure that brown colouring on the labels is working well enough, and even the grey labels could be a little clearer.

The general textures seem fine, although the desert edge is maybe a bit too abrupt (very obvious where the green coloration alongside the river ends currently). That seems to be accentuated by the line of desert-edge dunes north of the river too. The more wavy edge of the dunes south of the river looks more natural to my eye at least.

Map six is for the hamlet of Arvika:

I've made the usual updates elsewhere on the Forum & Gallery too, while the FCW and PDF notes follow:

Map six - Hex 1304, Arvika:

Arvika was one of the three settlements in this area that were originally shown on the existing Atlas map. In the absence of any text notes for it there, I simply looked at what the symbol was - a hamlet. As luck had it, no random feature was selected during the creation of my Whispering Wastes regional map for the hex it was in, but there was something in an immediately adjoining one, a mysterious ravine partly filled with webs, where a legendary artifact was guarded by a nest of Ettercaps. So I simply moved the ravine into the hamlet's hex, combining both elements. The hexes are six miles across, north-south, after all, so there's room for a lot more than just a single feature in each one.

The setting for the place was to be in a river valley, the Silvertongue, and I randomly discovered instead of the fords, so popular elsewhere so far, the proximity to the uplands had clearly provided stone enough for a bridge here for once, and it also turned out to be notably ancient, something that, like the Stormy Cleft ravine, simply helped reinforce why this hamlet had ended up being shown on the Atlas's area map, while other, seemingly larger or similarly-sized, settlements in the Whispering Wastes had not appeared there. Mapping it was straightforward enough, with the contour symbols fitted-in to act as the entrance to the ravine, although I did add a few more fields than I'd initially thought to provide some further interest around the settlement itself, which also lessened the impact of the ravine on the whole drawing.

So far as I'm aware, yes. I've done it before certainly.

Interesting, although there doesn't seem much more here than was already shown on the main Gold Coast map.

Might be worth adding a few more smaller features (dry valleys/wadis, rockier flat areas, dangerous soft or otherwise unusual sand areas, etc.), naming all the smaller settlements, and maybe naming the nomad tribes/trade routes suggested by the led camels too.

You should definitely add a scalebar.

Not sure if the labels mightn't be made clearer as well, perhaps using a smaller font size, so the place-name labels hide less of the "interesting" terrain.

Perhaps consider making the trails stand out a little better too, and maybe green-up the watercourse and lake edges everywhere more. The Nile creates a green valley surrounded by desert, for instance, so the active river and lake here should too.