@coffee: Now that looks good, however there is more needed for this than just "looks good". I intend this tileset to be actually usable . . .
Wow. What? You complained about "bland" tiles.
I personally think coffee's edit blows everything preceding it away. Way more personality and originality, bold and vivid colors. My eye passes over your cliff tiles at lightning speed. There's little to nothing interesting occurring, visually.
As a player, I'd
much rather jump around in coffee's edit than anything else I've seen in here so far.
You've come here asking for ideas on how to make your cliff set look better but just completely rejected an edit that 400% improved on your design as if there's nothing to learn from it. Did you really find it completely useless?
Another issue is repition . . .
It's tiles. When is repetition
not an issue? Mitigate it with tile variations - multiple visual options for tiles with the exact same functionality/hit collision. Is your solution for a non-"bland" tileset really to make the tiles more generic? Re-think that if you want to create an attractive tileset with minimal repetition.