For a whole week I have been trying to follow all possible tutorial-wiki's and forum posts concerning how to start to make my own scenery.
The biggest problem I encountered is that none of the tutorials described the things I saw in the software I had to install, none. Actually nothing seemed to correspond with the actual software which actually got me off from trying to do something. Heck, I couldn't even find and install all the possible programs (i.e.
http://www.terragear.org is offline permanently) and therefor I couldn't even pass the installation process.
The only thing I managed was to make a very good upgrade of the area of one airport in TaxiDraw. But the exporting and re-packing it into apt.dat.gz didn't work as described, nor did the steps look like the described, or maybe there were quite a few important things missing. Actually my goal was not too high - just to make this small airport (LBSZ) more realistic for me, I didn't even mean to submit it or anything since submitting material has many more requirements.
I usually fly on my MacBoo Pro but I soon realized that I had no chance of making any scenery with it, so I switched to my old PC with XP (in order to use fgsd). There I spent countless hours, virtually any free minute I had but I still could not even find the things described in the tutorials. I would have posted some logs or screenshots but I encountered just far too many problems/differences.
I know that writing tutorials is very time consuming and unpleasant, and I don't want to criticize anybody for having written a bad tutorial or something like that... I just want to point out that there are a few things that may have changed over time and require updated information, as well as the fact that lots of steps and information are missing - sometimes it's even hard to figure out which step is meant for which OS.
If I had managed to do this airport, I almost sure would have made even more airports and land, and would have tried to submit them for the whole community. Maybe others have also stopped because of the same reasons - the situation becomes more and more complicated with all kinds of problems.
I'd love to find an actually working possibility to make scenery that I could also try in FG. And I hope that the near future might bring us tools that would actually help us all develop better and more beautiful scenery.