You know, I feel silly now. I used the G.Projector to fix the south pole, but didn't even look at the north! It looked so nice in the equirectangular view, I didn't even think about it. It does look quite weird on the globe. Well, I'll go in after work and try to round those islands out and fix them up. Thank you for pointing that out!!

The weird texture is mainly just a side effect of the method I used to make the mountains. I used the render>clouds / lighting effect method to make the elevation map and it looks like the wrinkles are from using the soft brush before using the lighting effect. It does look really odd close up!

Once I get home, I will fix the various maps to match the new islands and then I'll get them on here.

Thank you, Shikotei!