Most of us who take photographs "seriously" are, when you clear away the clutter, mostly just ringing the changes on a pretty small set of tropes we've been exposed to a lot.
The major tradition in landscape art is "the sublime" which is a completely legitimate opinion, idea, of the landscape. Landscapes very often evoke the "I am in the presence of God's Handiwork" sort of sensation. This in turn has produced a handful of tropes (see: Ruskin, Turner, Robinson, Adams, Rowell, etc. The line is pretty straight for the last 200 years). So there's a strong tendency to simply rework those tropes over and over. This makes tons of guys super happy, so, terrific!
The results tend to be weak repetitions of the single idea: "the sublime". The repetition is weak because the artist is working the tropes, not the ideas.
Again, so what? It makes lots of guys super happy, it even sells some art. That's all to the good.
But it *does* tend toward kitsch. The sublime is beautiful, it's pretty. Because it's reworked tropes, the idea of the sublime is only weakly present.
Do you want to shoot a sunset that's not kitsch? Start with an idea. It's not sublime at all. It's a terrifying supernova. It's the 3rd and last sun to set on Barsoom. It's the last sunset on the last day on earth. It's sunset in a dinosaur infested hellscape from which no mammal escapes alive.
Or whatever. Just step away from the sublime in your head, then start thinking about how to shoot that instead of the same reworked "sublime" thing.
