It seems a lot better and more stable now, I really think it's getting there. The shadows look great!
Probably a known issue and it's only visible for a couple minutes, but one little thing I've been noticing is a hard edge to the atmosphere when you're just getting outside of it:
Might be connected to that same "pixellated" look to the atmospheric limb when seen from very far away. I noticed a cool little blue glow around Earth from a long distance, but it's very aliased and possibly unintentional.
I think it's really getting there, but some smoother distance transitions for the planetary atmospheric and ship shadow effects would really help push it to the next level... That might not be possible with the core, though. For example, as you're approaching Earth from the opposite side as the sun, it's completely invisible but then suddenly pops into a black disc, and from the opposite side it instantly goes from gray dot to blue ball. It'd be great if the glow effects could be applied to the "distant view" dot, so that it transitioned more smoothly from sprite to sphere.
A few other things I was wondering about that I didn't see consolidated answers to when searching this thread:
What's the plan with the terrain for bodies that don't have properly mapped elevation data? Is there going to be a generator like Orulex, or made-up heightmaps, or will they just be left until that data becomes available?
The other thing is clouds - I remember you saying volumetric clouds were in the works, but right now it seems like the clouds are very flat in comparison to the stock Orbiter, with microtextures and shadows both nearly invisible unless lit from a very low angle. Is it intended to be like that or is it just being ignored for now until the better clouds go online? Right now the anemic clouds are the main thing that keeps me from just going with DX11 full time.