I can explain the process a bit here.
Getting high quality digital elevation data is a long process of chasing down the various local authorities that are responsible for that data. Some locations have no real survey authorities and so you’re left with contacting third parties for portions of the data and then figuring out how to stick it all together. So in some locations it’s easy, because the data is readily available and public, and for other areas it is difficult because the data is incomplete, segmented, and privatized. Even when you do get good data access, getting data that is of a high enough quality to be acceptable in a sim with this kind of visual fidelity is no easy task either. Oftentimes data packages might be great in one area or kind of data and downright awful in another area. Even public data backed by large survey teams can very in quality and age drastically in the same dataset.
Then, when needing to go with non-public data (and even with some countries public data) there are associated licensing stipulations, which all have to be negotiated and cleared by both parties, and that process can take some time. The whole process from front to back is incredibly fiddly and requires a good deal of manual effort to make work across all the grades of quality, data formats, etc. It’s nowhere near as easy as just downloading a file from a data provider and uploading it to the cloud someplace. It takes serious person-hours. And it never ends, because the data is constantly changing.
Jorg specifically works incredibly hard at this kind of stuff, and he’s really really sensitive to being too US or euro centric. But there are practical limitations to the efforts. That being said, when really great sources of data are found, they do find themselves into world updates, and he’s talking with data providers literally daily.
-Matt | Working Title