I have recently noticed that certain distant objects look horrible.

The main two that I have discovered are 'distant' water falls, and fall forest trees. They look bad for different reasons.

For the waterfalls, they pretty much have nothing going for them. The meshes are very low detail, the textures are very low detail, and worst of all they aren't animated. I think I could stand the 'blob-like' look they take on, if they would just move. The other problem with them is that as you get closer to some larger waterfalls, half of them may pop-in and animate, while half remains 'blob-like.'

With the fall forest trees, I think they would be fine with a slightly better, brighter texture. They look dull in comparison to 'near' trees.

I'm sure these are just a few of the LOD meshes that need work, but they're the ones that've really stuck out to me. I've also noticed a couple of large objects that don't have LOD such as shipwrecks, and some icebergs.

Now that I've said all of that, is there any way to fix this? Also, is it just my imagination that the latest patch made this problem slightly worse?

I'd be willing to do some leg work on this stuff; I'm a quick learner and I've got experience with beth ini's, I just don't really know where to begin on this.

If you have self shadowing on trees activated from the ini, then there is a mod that matches the LOD to the trees.
http://static.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/images/194-1-1321708021.jpg
I hope the waterfall thing is doable, not sure if you can animate LOD's. Then again the dragons LOD is animated lol