Next comparision...
I picked fruit bat cave on my first farm because I liked the idea of more living things on my farm. I thought it would be cool to see and have bats flying around. Nope... all you see are some red eyes and you can have bats flying around anytime regardless. Furthermore, the mushroom cave gives you 6 mushrooms every 2-3 days. The fruit bats might give you one piece of fruit per week. The fruit they offer can be fruit tree fruit or some parts of foraging fruit. Although both can offer something outside of the season it's normally found, fruit is easy to find. Mushrooms aren't. I feel bad not giving the bats a home, but mushrooms are just superior.
Not explained: Why I can't have both in the one cave, why I can't have two caves or why I can't switch it after the initial decision.
Haven't tried it out, but isn't the monster farm pointless once you get to [a certain endgame place]? You can turn mob spawn on on every map, so every map can be the same as the monster farm. Unless there's a different monster.
I don't really see the monster/wilderness farm as being more than an early-game gimmick. Or maybe the equivalent of an early-game Hardmode / New Game+. I tried a few nights on it and all that spawned were Slimes and Bats. If you wanted a challenge, this could work, because it'll make night work a little more difficult.
There is a unique enemy, the
Wilderness Golem. According to the Wiki, the drops are nothing special (it also lists Fiber twice and has a comment there is a "minuscule chance" of a Prismatic Shard, so take that with a heap of salt).
I assume over time (as the player levels), the enemies might also get more varied, numerous or powerful. Slimes become Sludges, Bats become Lava Bats, and so on. I also assume turning on monster spawns will spawn all the same enemies as the Wilderness farm except the Wilderness Golem.
TL;DR: Wilderness farm is probably for if you want a challenge or you want a standard map alternate.
And good side of forest, because you can gather these berries, mushrooms, and even you can pick up way too hard to get fern, very early on first summer.
Mushrooms too, if you picked the fruit bat cave. There's one unique Secret Woods item for each growing season: Morel in Spring, Fern in Summer, Chanterlle in Autumn. Even if you visit every day, you might only get a handful of them. It really makes the mushroom cave far superior to the fruit bat cave.
Hardwood is still the best thing the map has to offer. And now since you can build on grass and chop off some trees (1.11), this map got even better.
Agreed. The woodland map feels the most fleshed out. I'm yet to seriously try the others, but it feels superior in every way. Especially if combined with a mushroom cave. All the difficult to obtain stuff is right on your doorstep.
Note that you can also plant trees on the grass as well. So you can have your fruit trees or syrup trees on the grass and leave the dirt for crops.
Edit: For an additional reply:
Just finished year 1 on Highland farm. The rate of geode/node respawn isn't really that much better than the quarry. Plus(or minus, really), the spawns are affected by your mining level.
It wouldn't surprise me if the highland farm and quarry use the same generation code. Does the quarry spawn geode nodes if you have a highland farm?