Thanks and sorry for the (very) late reply, haven't touched DR for quite some time now.
Personally, I think the other locations are quite well done actually from a visual point of view, maybe a bit dull compared to the new states in DiRT4, but certainly not completely off like Germany
Thanks for your review, much appreciated!
As for saturation, it's somewhat tricky to find the rightbalance between a washed out and a cartoony look. Personally, I prefer to go with slightly less intensity as too much mostly breaks the immersion. Plus, you can always add saturation/contrast etc. globally via SweetFX/Reshade!
I won't say it's impossible, but highly unlikely that there is frame loss from this particular mod. All I did was replacing one color palette dds file with another, which should make absolutely no difference frame-wise - at least I haven't noticed any change in performance while testing.