…felt a lot newer than Jakku being another desert and Takodana just being a pretty normal forest (with D’Qar being another green forest planet in the same movie).

D’Qar isn’t really shown to have forests. I mean, I’m sure it has some, but unlike Takodana we don’t spend any time in them.

Some ideas for potential crashed ship varieties:
Star Destroyers
TIE-Fighters
Bombers
Interceptors
A/B/X/Y-Wings
Rebel transports
Blockade runners
Nebulon-B frigates
Mon Calamari Cruisers
AT-ATs
AT-STs

Did someone say ABXY?

What if Snoke’s hologram room was the room where the younglings meet Yoda? They’re both roughly the same shape, and it seems fitting that Snoke’s hologram would be in a desecrated holy site.

I wonder if recoloring the sand would be challenging due to similarities with warner skin tone colors and Rey’s tan costume, for example. Maybe recoloring the sky to a pink or yellow could be more doable? Some of the swamp Jakku concept art had a really nice pink sky.

I remember trying all that I couldn’t get anything to work. Like you said, the colors are warm like skin, and on top of that, the sky and ground are similar colors sometimes. Anything we doe would have to be frame-by-frame. That’s why I came up with the cactus idea. It’s something you could just add to a few shots. That’s the sort of thing we should focus on, as it’s far more manageable.