Of what others have suggested and that I’ve read: the ones most similar to what you’ve finished are:

• The First Law series by Joe Abercrombie
• The Expanse series by James SA Corey
• Hyperion (at least the first two books, w/ optional two more) by Dan Simmons

New recommendations:

• Dhalgren by Samuel R Delany (content warning)
• The Baroque Cycle series by Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash and the Diamond Age may both be better starting points for the author, but may fit your other criteria less)
• The Book of the New Sun series by Gene Wolfe

Other works that stretch your genre boundary but may evoke the right emotion:

• Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
• If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
• The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
• Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
• The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
• Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff
• Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M Danforth
• John Dies at the End by David Wong

There’s still something to assembling it yourself. Viewed as an educational activity, it easily clears the bar for photo quality.

Yes you can get better photos by buying something else used, but that doesn’t mean this doesn’t have value.

Switzerland is in Schengen, but didn’t join until 2004.

You can also stitch them with ffmpeg if a CLI is more your speed

I keep seeing people talking about it being too dark. I’m not sure what that could mean, why wouldn’t you want darkness?

That’s a wonderful eggcorn.

I was watching a video talking about how eggcorns are an unusual category of error because they require intelligence and creativity to make. The argument was that the process goes like this:

A new word or phrase is heard, but not understood. The brain makes sense of it using existing vocabulary that has sounds that are close enough. This is accompanied an explanation for why those specific words make sense in this new context.

For example: the original eggcorn was a mishearing of acorn. Egg because it’s roughly egg shaped, and corn is sometimes used to describe small objects similar to how grain can be.

All this to say, it’s maybe not something to feel dumb about. Your brain did something neat.