ame summed up your questions with some pretty decent answers -speaking as someone who's been involved w/ the community for a decent amount of time now but i'll still throw my own two cents into the topic where i feel i can address.
i'm someone who has over the past few months spent a lot of time in all the maps and i feel inclined to agree. i love each and every map but i feel like the base items do well detailing and fleshing out maps, but are incredibly redundant, not to mention pretty much only four/five of the same textures are used on the ground. grass, sand, rock, rinse and repeat. i'm hoping there's been more contact with meshmakers to expand upon the current "default" items they have for mapmaking because there's so much to be done - and that any new maps utilize more of the fun textures the base game already has.
i've talked about my hopes of more biomes ingame and perhaps elsewhere.
all in all i don't know where the line'll wind up being between having a simple game that can run on most computers vs. complexity and beautiful visuals will lie. i'm hoping they stick closer to the first and keep letting the community do their thing with the latter.
all i can really say for certain is i know maps are going to keep being detailed... but we're probably never going to get something as expansive as say.. south pole or fluorite plains ever again.