Whoops - my bad, I meant to say
2.0. (My apologies to you and themadgreek). Moreover, on some pages the scenery version numbers were actually those of the associated FlightGear version, leading to confusion. I'll clarify.
- World Scenery 1.0 (released in 2008 and updated till 2013) is the old, "simple" scenery version. I think it's what you get from the "2.12" Scenery download page (I checked the timestamps, almost all of them are dated September 2013, whereas the new 2.0 scenery was released in November 2013; this would also confirm your findings).
- World Scenery 2.0 (released in November 2013) is what you get from TerraSync/TerraMaster or this official torrent (warning, it's a bit outdated). That's the latest version with the improvements you noticed.
- World Scenery 3.0 is only in the "planning" phase.
Based on this, I believe the "2.12" scenery you can download from the site is in fact World Scenery 1.0 (it was named "2.12" because its latest revision was initially bundled together with FlightGear 2.12, World Scenery 2.0 was published after a month or two). Guess the site was not updated to reflect that.
In short: if your system can handle it (in terms of RAM and disk space consumption), you should get the scenery via TerraSync/TerraMaster.