My idea for the far future
A good vision.
Early in my cultivation efforts I went to a tiled approach. I decided on 0.1x0.1 tiles. I created a utility that once I entered the center coordinates of a tile it spat out a set of bat files and power shell scripts to download the OSM file, download image file for tree autodetect, generate elevation contours, run scenProc, run osm2AFSobject, and deploy the results.
I decided on the 0.1 degree tile size because it was more user friendly than the AFS hex tile convention for names and coordinates.
When AeroScenery came out I contemplated switching to the AFS hex tile convention but have not gone there (yet). You really need a map driven interface to give usability and visibility of the cultivation state for hex tiles.
Any cultivation integration framework needs to be highly adaptable. For example as I am flying if I see an annoying cultivation glitch, I use my Flight Path Recorder and Google Earth to determine exactly where in which cultivation tile the discrepancy lies. I can then update the OSM or configuration file as required and add that tile to the Cultivate_These_Tiles batch file to run later. In my experience cultivation is an iterative process that is never really done.
Everybody has their own criteria on what "good enough" means. Or their own idea of what aspects of cultivation are important. For me trees are important. I use auto detect for trees to give a realistic sparse distribution at elevation and elevation contours to vary the tree species with elevation.
But autogen buildings leave me cold. Orbx True Earth is a step in the right direction, but I an not ready yet to give up the rich variation of the ortho image roof textures for the handful of stock textures. Even in commercial DLC's I have replaced most of the ortho images with higher resolution.
osm2AFSobject was developed because significant objects in the landscape are important to me, but again we need to work on the textures.
So in summary, I agree that more automation of scenery development is a good thing , but the core technologies are not yet at the state that there is a one size fits all solution.
A black box approach can only provide average results.
/Stu