I'm going to be rather honest with you, the last area you posted (most recent) completely sucks big time.
Firstly, it has far too much open space, which nothing occupies. It looks completely desolate and empty. I suggest that you draw on paper what you plan on including in your maps. When you have finished you transfer this to the computer, and make everything as close together as possible. The last thing any player wants in a 2D Zelda game is to spend ages walking through big spaces of bright green, it disorientates them and can make players impatient.
Secondly everything is still far too square, too perfect. You need to remember that this is an outdoor area, the vast majority is natural. When have you ever been out and seen perfectly square shaped hills or cliffs? Take a look at this:
Far from perfect. Your trees also need to be spaced less predictably. What with the two lines of trees in the middle? The player clearly cannot get through them, make them a single line and also, not perfectly straight. Have about 2-3 lines in a single place, and have them placed oddly, but so that the player cannot get through. Where in LTTP have you seen it otherwise?
The road bit which goes up also, you have used cave tiles. I know you stated that you do not have a good tileset, but cave tiles are dark because they are indoors where their is no light, therefore they simply dont work here.
The river / water area again is too perfect, it needs changing drastically. You're cliff tiling also, that area in the bottom left with the three different cliffs could easily be merged into one and it would look far less ugly. In addition, their is nothing around the outside of the map, such as trees or something to make it look like the map simply doesn't end where your cliffs start. You're house tiles also, the door is cut off at the bottom, it makes the house smaller unnecessarily, this is never done in LTTP.
I know your map is not complete, so some of my comments may seem a little unfair at this stage, don't take it negatively, I am just trying to give helpful advice. From my perspective it seems that you have good layout skills in terms of thinking of a great game map, you just don't have the tiling skills to make it look good in game. This will of course, come with time and experience.
Anyway, I have found maintiles.png and attached it to this post. It wont be able to help you with the cliff issue, but you have trees, grass areas and houses (which look far better than you have now). Hopefully this will help you to make your map better. Good luck.
