Hi Compans57,
I will try to be short.
The "cartoney" ships that you are seeing are probably ships imported from older SH games (SHIIII and SHIV). Some of them miss ambient occlusion maps, specular maps and other stuff which enhance the three-dimensionality of stock SH5 ships. Moreover, they are stored in an older file format than vanilla ships, a format that SH5's graphic engine still support, though its shaders are not optimized for rendering them as well as units of the new format. While I will agree with you that they might look better, they still add a lot to the game in therms of variety and gameplay challenge. You could try removing them manually, but you would miss an important feature and, what is worse, you would risk continuous ctd's if they are scripted in the campaign.
As for the environmental factors, rest assured that TWoS environment is a big step forward compared to vanilla both in therms of variety and of visual quality. You are probably playing one of the first campaigns, in the Baltic and during winter. If you think that environmental colors are too pale and that light is not "vibrant" enough, well, you are right, but you should know that this was made on purpose to reflect the mostly cloudy weather of Nordic winters. As the season change, and as you move South, in the Mediterranean, South Atlantic and Indian Ocean, you will surely notice how the quantity of light will gradually increase and colors will becoming more vivid. Conversely, in vanilla game environment factors are lesser varied, and no matter where you are, you will always have almost the same colors. You could in theory revert to vanilla settings, but since the files involved are many and with many correlations between them, that's not an easy tweak either and you would loose more than you are gaining from it.
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