I didn't realize you were concerned about the linen finish.
The linen finish is a brilliant misnomer about quality of card production.
During the production of paper, linen fabric used to be added to make the resulting material stronger. Consequently, the price was so much higher, it's not actually feasible to use the method any more.
Modern games with linen finish use an embossing technique to shape the card to give the effect of a 'linen-finish', but the resulting paper is only as strong as its density.
There are some benefits of a linen-finish though, especially for Carcassonne. Firstly, a smooth surface is much easier to damage, or flake printed-ink from. The embossing does offer some protection to scuffing (a crumple-zone of sorts). Another benefit comes from stacking the tiles. All the games I've played with smooth tiles are significantly harder to stack, the tiles are much more susceptible to fall down if they are knocked the table is bumped. The linen-finish seems to provide a higher level of friction to stop the tiles moving about so freely; probably because both sides of the tiles are embossed.
Also, don't forget that in 2015 Hans im Glueck decided to change the production methods of tiles. It's more than likely South Sea was printed using the old technique, and obviously Amazonas will be using the latest.
I reported on this issue here.