Eddie
Your idea of God’s overcoming a rather resistant earth is interesting - not sure if I agree or not. But your point about context is absolutely right. To wrench “Let the land produce…” from the following “And God made” is clearly abusive of the text.
In any case, what any reasonable pre-Darwinian would make of “Let the land produce” is self-evidently not something along the lines “Let the earth-world-system evolve…” but something much simpler: crops come from earth, and animals indirectly come from earth. Even now a farmer will speak of his land producing wheat or pasture, and by implication the land is also the source of his livestock, since they eat the pasture.
That’s shown by God’s saying “Let the waters team…” rather than “Let the earth bring forth fish”. The sea is the substrate for aquatic life as the soil is the substrate for land life. Simple, intuitive and absolutely not applicable in any way to evolution - such an interpretation is just as naively accommodationist as the vapour canopy.
So in your interpretation, the soil was barren until God’s intervention. In mine, the statements are simply in parallel, for God doesn’t create plants and stick them in the ground, but he creates living, growing vegetation. Likewise for the animals. Either way, God’s active creation is the focus, not any modern stuff about self-creation or co-creation.