The black looks better because you have the political colors covering the entire area instead of just outlined.

For the profantasy videos what I do most of the time is play them as background noise and when I hear something that interests me or is some tip I haven't seen or want to use I'll pause it, back it up, watch it, try it out, then go back to the background noise mode. Works really well for me. Written stuff I really like in paper form but now a days they are all PDF's which works. I can blow up the display scale for my old eyes and can do searches but still like paper better as I can have it in front of me while I'll doing it instead of jumping between windows or digging my ipad out to read them on it.

Use both use the spectrum trees for the snowy areas and the darkland trees for the other areas and throw in some autumn spectrum where you think they would work. In my Endoria map I'm currently using symbols from 4 different styles even though the overall map is spectrum overland. Also using fills from multiple styles so consider using the snow fills from spectrum where you need them.

Her is a sample using spectrum, darklands and the HW together. And yes the terrain is the rusty metal from darklands. Thought it fit well for what I was trying to do for the area

I would try changing your political boundaries to different colors for each area. You can have two or more areas with the same color boundary but just not next to each other. That would separate the boundaries better and make it easier to see where the boundaries are. I would also use polygons for the area with a filled color and a sheet effect to just show the boundary edges. after you use the smooth poly tool to make the boundary. then use the smooth to straight command to turn the area into a straight poly then you can use the trace command to trace the border of the neighboring region. Once your all done you can leave them as straight or change them back to smooth polys by using the straight to smooth command.

Just an idea for you to think about.

sample below - not all done but this is what I'm currently working on

If you don't want to do all the work to recreate the map for your political boundaries you can easily do the political boundaries in CC3+ with sheets and effects also.