Great shots mike! And glad to see you're working with REX now! Yes, like FSX, REX takes a little settings fiddling to make it fuction well on your system. One big piece of advice is, skip all that texture loading time by making your own theme (experiment with texture combinations to see what looks best) and then disable those decided-on textures from reloading in the Options tab. I'm set with things like taxiways, runways, lights and Sun effects, and especially tropical water/coral (they seem to take ages to "colorize"). Then the only options I exchange regularly are Sky colors, Clouds, and Water textures. Really saves time on loading textures.
as for the blurry shorelines, I used to get that with default water, so usually had it disabled, but I found that some water schemes don't seem to make that 'floating shore' effect anymore. I believe I also saw some improvement with water textures when I added this to my fsx.cfg:
(under [GRAPHICS])
ALLOW_SHADER_30=1
This will make FSX Shader 3 compatible, which I believe REX uses. (someone much brighter and 'in-the-know' than I am will probably blow me out of the water on this...)
Anyway, that also seemed to darken the water somewhat at night. That or I'm just seeing things again.
again FSX default water was bright at night on my modest rig from the start.
Hope you enjoy avoiding your new weather!