I haven't totally given up on the random map generator... just on helping Targa run it on his Windows box
By playing with the -d switch, you can easily have more "uniform" provinces; that is, the brown/green/etc dots won't be so isolated. Easier on the eyes, if you ask me, though the result is still quite bland - anything nicer would clearly need some image processing, which can be done with the Gimp, but I don't have the courage to go through the Gimp documentation to learn how to do this.
I should add a switch to make the random generator output a single color for land, like it does for sea; that would probably make life easier on the "hand" creators, and would not be too much work. But then, I wonder - should I leave terrain in the .map file, or not?