How did you make the texture look so realistic?
It's just my style and work methods... I've been doing "photorealistic" textures few years now and I use as a base for most of my work real photographs (I even have two free packs of those on my websute, but they are currently down beacuse of the bandwidth they took).
I wouldn't do "handdrawn" textures even if someone wanted, I think that we now have enough good hardware to do realistic looking textures too. This crate is still missing a good specular/glossiness map which would make it look much better and can be done in Blitz too [spherical reflection map and texture map with alpha on top that].
I have literally gigabytes and gigabytes of base/source images I have been taking with my and our company digital cameras over the years, and there are also few good places on the net where you can get royalty free photosources. These like most of my own snapshots are nowhere near "ready" textures, but then you fire up your PhotoShop and make them textures by tweaking like correcting the levels, hues, contrast etc and removing warpings... and I also use often only bits from photos and combine them to other photos, and use layers and layer effects extensively to get the final outcome I want.
The crate texture has 14 active layers that all contribute something to the final result - keeping stuff layered is good also for making different versions of the texture like one without texts. Ideally you'd have only one base color (plain even color) and you built everything on top of that like the rust and scratches, logos and other stuff that makes texture look "real". This way you only have to change the base color to something else and you'd have a different colored crate - but try to adjust a brown rusty metal to be a blue rusty metal; it's hard because the base color and rust are so close to each other, you have to make a good mask by hand at least for area color change, but if you had the base color on a different layer... well you get the idea!
Two (old) articles I wrote about modeling and texturing for real-time use that may make my approach more clear:
http://www.caffeineoverdose.net/cod/articles_article1.shtml
http://www.caffeineoverdose.net/cod/articles_article2.shtml