I'd be willing to bet that a vast majority of the same people that are pointing out the issues here would actually appreciate the ability to have a perfect satellite rendering at altitude. I know I would. I don't think there is any other way to generate the entire world ground scenery "accurately" any time soon with our current level of technology. My only preferred alternative to that would be accurate 3d graphics of the entire world (osm-city, models db, land cover, etc). That too has many issues and really is even farther from ever becoming a reality (I'm talking accurately of the entire world). So in my "vision" it should be a combination of the two, transitioning by altitude. But that doesn't change many of the facts pertaining to both concepts.
We don't get to control satellite imagery, when it is taken, what cloud cover exists at the time, what movable ground objects are where.
We can work around some of it, I suppose we might be able to make it more seasonal by applying pixel tricks. shader manipulation, whatever techniques you can throw at it.
If the satellite imagery is updated constantly at least we get a fairly accurate picture of the world. But is the imagery we would have access to GPL?
My alternative of 3d modeling has even more issues in relation to accuracy. Imagine trying to keep 3d modeling up to date with the day to day changes of the entire world. What kind of manpower would it take to do the entire world?
I used to think about scenery in games like GTA. Wow, why can't we have that? There are flying machines in that game and they can handle the overhead. As cool as that might be, there is never going to be enough manpower and talent to pull something like that off world wide and again, your back to a dynamic world that isn't standing still.
So really, if you want a dynamic and accurate world scenery, satellite imagery issues maybe aren't as insurmountable as other ideas and may be the only way to get a consistently accurate ground picture.
But that doesn't negate the issues involved.
However, if I have a choice of what I saw of my local area when using OSG-Earth VS the scenery I built using the Terragear tool set. I would take the Terragear version, if for no other reason as I have control over what that looks like and it looked as good close to the ground as it did in the air.
Even that scenery in reality has changed in the couple years since I made it, but I have the ability to regenerate it to whatever accuracy I want. The tools are already in place. I just have to be willing to put in the time it takes to put it all together. In theory I could make it match a satellite image and still get all the benefits of 3 dimension with none of the negative issues of a static picture taken who knows when.
And if your 25 years experience perspective is that it can not be done, then where is the problem to still just let the proposal be.
No one took a proposal of the table. There was no proposal, it was a grip about lack of documentation that started all of this. The answer was appropriate for the level of effort displayed by the original poster to educate themselves of how this all works, in my opinion. Then another party chimes in with personal insult and profanity. Where is your affront to that?
If someone ever had the audacity to say to my face, "I'm really frustrated, you don't ever seem to be able to document your work here", I'm not going to react very well. That answer came from someone that does document their work extremely well. I think it was more of a defense reply for those of us that contribute but don't take the additional time to document it. Be thankful the work is there at all.