You're absolutely right, TU. Before I used the texture mapping I tried to create some natural looking cracked rock surfaces. Didn't really work, so I thought why not using texture maps?
So I started to use two or three different textures, each one on top of the other, broken up by some power fractals to make the tiling more or less invisible. Then I realized that the textures are distorted at the vertical parts of the terrain.
And I thought why not using the "through camera" mapping, when it looks natural. What I REALLY did NOT want to see is this projection through the render camera because this always looks fake. So I created another camera at the 4 o'clock position relative to the render camera, as I already mentioned.
In the image map shaders I applied the displacement with a low value of 0.15. The first version had 0.3, but as you can see it was too much.
Even if it's not as pure as procedurals, there's still a lot of things that can be wrong. So for me it's a challenge.