How can I improve those ditherings?
Dithering is not my forte but regarding the sky, one idea is to break it up with the suggestion of clouds and atmosphere.
I started a tiny bit of it in my edit.
Here i stick with 50% dither because that's all I know how to do without it looking shit.
The basic idea is to keep the bands of dithering thinner than the solid bands, and create variations to disrupt the obvious edges.
Regarding your other dithering...what is going on there
Is it some kind of bloom effect?
If so, why is the ground darkened by light?
I just don't get it.
I had to do something with your GO sign since the G wasn't readable and got sucked into editing for a while.
Hope you get something out of it.