The Order of DEM Creating Steps

I need some advise:

I have the perfect setting for Sentinel-1 InSAR, desert-like conditions, no vegetation cover, very high coherence (> high temporal coverage (my baseline is 12 days) but keep getting miserable results. My steps:

  1. S1 TOPS Coregistration with ESD
  2. Interferogram generation
  3. Goldstein Phase Filtering
  4. Phase unwrapping with snaphu
  5. Phase to elevation

It seems that already the interferogram is below what it could be. The topography is clearly more distinctive, even in a 30m SRTM. But I cannot get close to that with Sentinel-1 data.
I tried different image pairs to reduce the chance of atmospheric distortions, but the results are the same. Any ideas what else can cause this low quality?