Bad render of eps and pdf surface plot

I am using version R2015b (Unix) to generate surface plots based on experimental data which I hope to publish in a peer-reviewed journal, however I am having the same problems as this previous post. A sample figure of mine is attached to this post. I've tried to set the renderer to Painters from OpenGL without success.

Has there been any progress from Matlab or independent developers to improve the appearance of these plots? Of course there is the option to change the settings of your preferred pdf viewer locally (disable line smoothing) to solve the issue of white lines, but the image quality is in general poorer. This unfortunately isn't so useful in the end because my community will be viewing a pdf of my manuscript.

An alternative approach is to use R2012b or earlier release to generate these plots, however in general the quality of other plots (that are included in a figure with the attached plot) is lower and another small problem is that the colormap parula is not supported. The last resort is to stitch together the figure manually by combining plots from R2012b and R2015b but that will be a pain.

Does anyone have any advice?

[Walter Roberson]

Why R2012b or earlier and not R2014a or earlier?

[Kevin]

Stupid answer: I have R2015b and R2012b installed.

Was the graphics engine changed in R2014a then?