In FSX or other sims where the world content is purely “hand-made” your point is 100% correct.
However, I think your argument is not related to the problem which this thread is trying to raise awareness about.
The goal (and slogan) of MSFS was always: “Fly anywhere in the world you want” (or that like).
The solution Asobo+MFS use(d) was/is:
- combine Bing sat images
- with OpenStreetMap data
- and other available data sources (weather, etc)
- and … autogenerate … the world.
So, this thread IMHO is not about “MS+Asobo are lazy and greedy and I insist on everything being for free” … but more that it somehow seems like they have a bug in their “earth creation engine (control data)” which caused them to totally “miss” this interesting island. At least the autogeneration process seems to have made some easy to spot mistakes (like a missing airport, which exists in OSM).
Regarding the Bing sat images of Saint Helene, which seem to be of very good quality, I fear that the data is not provided “for free” by MS to MS. Perhaps they have some internal “profit center payment rules” in place between MS projects … and since MSFS needs a consistent planet, MSFS most likely uses a copy of the entire Bing data and so they might try to optimize their storage cost by reducing the sat image LOD for certain places.
I stumbled over this issue because I wanted to visit Saint Helena … but there are other place that I have not yet seen, so I will try to return to this island in 2024.