i remember we talked briefly about this two years ago, but i am not happy to report that in two years, i also haven’t found alternatives to this type of problem 
my contours-in-MeshPatch-out workflow works pretty well, but i haven’t needed to use it in a while. the basic premise is that you do everything you need to do by modifying projected 2D contours, then mesh patch those contours to get a mesh and then clean it up. it’s all a mesh but we’ve used the workflow for cut and fill exercises before we had a civil engineer on a project.
i feel like there’s gotta be ways to get what you’re going for through adjusting view settings. i was able to get this shaded view to work by hiding all the mesh wires and turning off the lighting (the black lines are the input contour lines):
Copy of Shaded.ini (13.9 KB)