Taken from the core feature set description:
"Render entire planets, sweeping vistas, tiny rock gardens, or anything in between."
I keep this in mind when requesting new features, yes rocks are composed of an amalgam of different minerals and I acknowledged that fact after a fashion in my post.
The fact is, is that you cannot get away from crystal shape and structure as it is part of the geomorphology of every rock in existence and there are people who like to get in close to their terrains as there is more to TG2TP then Orbital planet shoots and high altitude vistas not that there's any thing wrong with those.
Like I said before in another post its to do with the detail, we CG artists are trying to sell the illusion to non artists (Our Public) that what they are seeing is real; during a life time we all pick up a great deal of information about the world we live in and to a greater or lesser degree we know what landforms of different kinds look like take a small peace of that information away and some thing dose not seem right, we may not really know what it is, but some how it looks less real, not so convincing, thus any thing that our software can do to help sell the image the better of we are.
Look at it like this in the past with Terragen you had to use image overlays to create certain effects that you couldn't do due to the limited functionally of the software, many of these effects (though not all) can be achieved in TG2TP using the expanded feature set and things look better then they did before of coarse there are times when image overlays are still needed, but there may come a day when the feature set of Terragen is expanded to make this technique obsolete.
Image maps and there like only work from certain camera angles and distances, any one familiar with a game called quake (The first one" and games like it will have seen what I mean with the use of bitmaps fine from a distance and certain angles for which that where designed but up close that's a different story.
I would never suggest any thing that would make Terragen less versatile that is not my aim, if I have understood the Idea of Terragen correctly which is to render natural phenomena in a photorealistic manor then there is no escaping crystal size and structure and grain in rocks.
Surely, the idea of a comprehensive landform generator and renderer would have to work on both the small and large scales at the same time.
Regards to you.
Cyber-Angel