arXiv:2611.13920v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated fruit grading, sorting, and orientation systems require real-time, accurate detection of fruit-level morphological landmarks rather than the fruit boundary alone. This paper presents a custom, fully self-collected and self-annotated dataset of 1506 apple images (1054 training, 301 validation, 151 test) captured under controlled, fixed-camera conditions and annotated for three target classes: fruit body, stem cavity, and calyx. A YOLO11s detector trained with default hyperparameters is adopted as the baseline, and a systematic, one-factor-at-a-time ablation study is conducted across input resolution, data augmentation policy, optimizer configuration, and lightweight architectural enhancement to identify the factors that most improve detection of these fine-grained landmarks under high inter-cultivar color and texture variability. Neither increased input resolution, nor any of six tested augmentation variants, nor manual optimizer tuning improved on the untuned baseline (F1 = 0.9047); only a same-slot architectural substitution of the backbone's C2PSA block with Coordinate Attention (CA) matched the baseline's overall F1 (0.9038) while reducing parameter count by 10.2% and achieving the study's best mAP@0.5 (0.935) and best stem-cavity F1 (0.8217). A confidence-threshold sweep identified 0.15 as the deployment operating point for this model, and a confirmatory experiment combining the CA-swap architecture with the best-performing augmentation variant showed the two effects do not combine additively, reversing the architectural gain rather than compounding it. The resulting design recommendations --- the CA-swap architecture alone, at a 0.15 confidence threshold --- target real-time apple landmark detection for orientation-aware industrial sorting and alignment systems.