Crushed blacks in pro landscape shots?

Hi friends,

I recently found myself guilty of using crushed blacks in moody shots, as I feel they improve moody pictures to a degree. But I think I already took it to far and tend to crush blacks on almost all of my shots.

Now I do mostly landscapes, and I just browsed some National Geographic Images and looked at some Images from Pro Landscape Photographers and found that almost none of them (Except Alex Strohl ofc) uses this Instagram craze on their images.

How do you feel about this? Is it just a momentary thing?

I would like to get the best possible landscapes and I start to get the feeling that crushing the blacks on almost all of them is contra productive.

Although one thing I learned, using the Tone Curve much more, even I don't crush blacks I use the Tone Curve on almost all of my images now to adjust them, that's what I've never done before, so theres a small benefit at least :)

Have you had a phase like that and went back to your normal editing behaviour?