it could certainly add a virtual 'fog of war effect' neither side would be so familiar with the environment. that would result in even more iffy tactics made by each team.

however, keep in mind that procedurally generated land is relatively new to games, and so the tech for it sometimes allows for buggy landscape. it might even make cetain objectives unreachable. how would you feel if you needed one more cannon to get in the lead, but objective 'B' is buried in sand?

The plan wasn't to generate planet surfaces on the fly. Initially the plan was to use the textures of the planets in Eve to generate a surface that kind of matched it, which would then be adjusted (by hand) to remove problem areas. The problem with this method is that it would take an astounding amount of disk space.

That's why they went with the terrain + socket + mood combo thing. Once there are a certain number of terrains and sockets you'll basically never play on the same map twice in one night. I think the biggest thing they could do to improve this though is to design the playable areas of each terrain to be much larger than they are and then make the redline shape another variable. If you're playing line harvest again it won't feel like line harvest if what we now know as the northern part of the map was in the southern end. By shifting the playable area around you could make a wildly different experience. Hardware limitations might make this impossible but it's an idea.

This was one of the features frequently mentioned early in dusts beta. What ever happened to it?

Wouldn't starting procedural landscape generation make for more interesting/varied combat environs with little work from CCP? Hell, if Dwarf Fortress can make procedurally generated terrain work why can't Dust?