Thank you, both of you! I have a dot matrix in the working folder with the way the landmasses and distances are distorted, and there's a good chance your reasoning is sound!

Many of the land protuberances seem to have been eaten during the transition to Illustrator. That, or they got cut because they managed to look less-than-vaguely obscene. There seem to be some brilliant tutorials on achieving realistic coastlines on this forum, so I won't be at a loss for examples and resources (although Photoshop seems much more prevalent than Illustrator).

Thank you for the advice on the poles, and thank you for identifying what my misconception was.

Hopefully, I'll have a revised version sometime in the next few days!