In the comments section of this map by Simo in 2021, you will find some real chatting from this Zenit character.
Aside from the obvious (declaring that there are only 2 good mappers and everyone else sucks), there are two things I would like to point out, and especially the latter continues to be relevant today.
I’m thankful this attitude of “new mappers put more effort into scenery than route and I hate it” has somewhat died out, because it’s really absurd. The simple truth is it takes a long time to get good enough at driving / understanding lines to build interesting routes, and you don’t have to do that for scenery. It’s a different skillset. It’s not about effort, mappers are (and always were) trying, and to act like they’re not is very rude, even if they are not succeeding.
“Restrictions breed/spark/(many words have been used here) creativity” type comments are getting misinterpreted or misused far too often. To be clear, this is a general concept/phrase in a lot of creativity focused endeavors, and it certainly is good advice for people running into the problem of doing the same things over and over in whatever their creative pursuit is. HOWEVER! Doing something with more restrictions doesn’t make it inherently creative or inherently more creative than something else with ""fewer/less restrictions"". All it means is that restricting yourself is a good way to force yourself to work outside of your comfort zone and find new solutions and do things you wouldn’t otherwise do. In that regard, if you have only built within tmnf’s restriction set for a decade, giving yourself a different set of restrictions, even if it is objectively less “restrictive” will breed more creativity (in the sense of how the saying goes at least, obviously not a guarantee). ‘Restrictions spark creativity’ is not an argument for forever creating in a certain environment, in this context it is a justification that only works if you already believe that environment’s restrictions to be inherently superior.
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