lol what updates did we have since then?
like stufftons??? hell, only the major fixes and additions/removals are documented, there's tons more minor fixes
So you want them to have shaders/shadows on terrain maps even though they said it would be stress full to even a modern computer.
to be fair, given enough time the map system could possibly be optimized. that will take time and effort though, things that badspot and kompressor need for more important updates (the most obvious being integration into steam). it's only a two-man show here; more popular games by large companies have entire teams dedicated solely to optimization.
a good example is cortex command, that game lags on a forgetin nasa supercomputer simply because it's not optimized.