Haha, she's smiling^^
I have a question though, do you use the JPGs straight from the camera or do you use RAW files?

Use RAW, and then convert into JPEG.

In what fashion are you editing them? I dunno, I just think you photos could use a little more sharpening and contrast :3

basic, correcting white balance, adding sharpness, exposure correcting too. Fiddling with highlights, contrast and shadow.

I think you can go a little further with those settings.
What I like to do is crank down the exposure to increase saturation, then I rank up the contrast (I set Lightroom to the high contrast curve). Then I fiddle with lights and all those other settings. Clarity, dynamics and saturation can do a lot as well!
And then my final step is to increase lumincance in the HSL settings. And I sharpen the image of course.
I usually just try to get a very contrasty and saturated image. Lightroom also has two cute little vignetting presets, those can be fun to use as well^^

Not really a fan of editing. Try and do as much as I can in camera, as that's where I prefer to do my work.
Hense the basic editing/ corrections. Try and keep as much as what the camera sees in the photo instead of all the more artificial colours created by the editing.

That's cool if that is how you want your photos to look^^
As it seems DSLRs tend to produce rather unsharp and low contrasty images that kind of demand to be edited. When I edit my photos I also try not to make them look artificial.
Take this one for example: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/10474985/
The file from the camera just looked really bland and uninteresting. The edited image is really close to what this scene actually looked like when I was there.

Is often a case of fiddling with the camera settings I find. But sometimes have had odd results.

Yeah, naturally. Whitebalance has to be set correctly and if you keep it on "neutral" picture control (at least that is what it is called on my Nikon^^) you are gonna get boring results.
But if you change these settings to landscape for example that won't work in every situation and it might make post production more difficult. That is why I keep it on neutral. Some shots I have to edit more, some I have to edit less but so far I never had any trouble with editing.

Find with my Sony NEX 5N, not have to do as much, as it has a vivid setting.

My laptop tends to do that automatically when looking at photos.