I suspect the caution about rivers stems from confusion on your original sketch -- I had to work on my little screen to discern the labels making some blobs mountain ranges. Once I grasped that, I believed your river system. One water question - the little blob in the NW between Sundering Mountains, Shield Mountains, and ... Mountains - is that a no- outlet lake? If so i guess the associated rivers make sense. What's the N-S line bisecting the shield mountains, running from the sunderings to the S coast?
The digital rendering is an improvement, and in any case it's fine for your sketch to be generalized into smoothness. Thing is, though, parts of your digital coast *look* like you took a smooth-ish original and wiggled in some irregularity. The innermost bay at the center looks scalloped -- repeated notches and bumps of similar size. Kind of like many 16th -17th century maps put river wiggles in suspiciously regularly. Does it make sense to say some of your irregularity borders on being too regular? :-)
I love your inclusion of many scales of coastal islands - too many mappers ignore barrier islands, leaving an apparent rule of "all islands are in the middle of bodies of water", which is a rule the real world seems to have missed.
Granted that you thought ahead re: mountain placement - you still haven't depicted anything much in other topography. You *can* decide on a coast then figure what lies just inland, that just seems backwards, and could lead to subtly implausible arrangements. For instance, the sunderings are your only high land approaching the sea. -- real mountain forming processes often happen near coasts - colliding tectonic plates, for instance. True enough, some will be mid-continent. I could imagine the Sundering Mountains as the seam where two plates are colliding, Himalayan style. The other ranges could be leftovers of older uplift events or patches of volcanism. Other than that, do you plan any hills/ plateaus/ rough territory near the sea? For instance, is there even a modest spine down that lower E-W strip, separating the gulf/ bay complex from the southern ocean? If there is, wherever it lies close to the sea, there'll be different coastal geological processes going on. For that matter the character of your sea floor is going to make a huge difference. Broad shallow gently sloping coastal shelves would make long swooping beachy shores plausible, or highly indented swampy delta/ bayou country. But one would expect a more fingered set of sharp ish indentations if the coast falls away more sharply - say with the drowned mountain fjord systems of Scandinavia or the drowned hilly character of the US DelMarVa Peninsula / Chesapeake Bay.
I guess what I'm saying, with too many words as usual, is all manner of smoothness, jaggy ness and irregularity is plausible, if you sell the viewer on how it got that way. Some of us geo-freaks are OCD-analyzing topography on every last map. Some folks couldn't care less. A vast middle bunch will have a bit of subconscious feel for plausible landforms... arbitrary randomness just won't *add* to your believability. And after all, you want the viewer to imagine this is a real place, right?
If you figure on giving a photoshop file to someone to finish, you can still leave all manner of sloppy / sketchy annotations on separate layers. I've seen folks specifying with simple spray painted colors for mountains, hills, forests, and so forth.
While your digital version has more irregularity, it still seems oddly rectangular. In many file types undetailed space is cheap, size-wise. Even the same landform if surrounded by a generous amount of sea; might look less page-filling. And a finished continental map will look better with a bit more sea-- think of paintings with mats as well as frames. If your land winds up highly detailed, the sea gives you freedom to place key, legend, annotations, even some coastal-feature labels offshore, leaving your focus territory less cluttered.
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