Recommendation on a tool to build 16km"2 map (World Machine, World Creator, Geoglpyh, Houdini etc)?

World Machine will be your best bet. You just have to learn how to use it properly. It’s pretty much the industry standard for world creation. Geoglyph is just an IDE for WM that expands on some functionality.

There are some other promising alternatives like World Creator, but they are still heavily in development and are just as UI unfriendly(in other ways).