agweber

'Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy".'

Stems from https://xkcd.com/903/ alt-text. Might not be the original source, but that's where I know it from.

I wonder if having a single texture and randomly rotation it with blending the edges on a square grid would look just as good or not. The texture would just have to be larger than the tile it covers

All of your points also exist in Renaissance era Ultima Online. There are a number of custom shards with playerbases that want this exact experience.