It's a devastating bug for explorers, it has literally killed almost all of my motivation to explore at all in Elite, which means I don't play much Elite anymore. I spent weeks searching for non-beige HMC's and MR's chronicled in my thread here:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...rch-for-Color!-(sequel-to-The-Wrath-of-Beige)
Statistically I determined that about 99% of all HMC's are very much a monotone beige color, with very low color gradation on the surface, and about 85% of MR's are monotone beige too. Update 2.2 drained the color from planet surfaces in the galaxy, bigtime.
Michael said they knew what was causing it and would fix it down the road, so I am a tad more optmistic than Ziggy on the issue, but he is right, it should be a higher priority than Frontier is making it IMHO. This affects a HUGE part of the game in a massive way, and the fact that it is explorer content rather than combat content should not relegate it to low priortiy status, in my honest and humble opinion.
I'd love to have an update from Frontier on this issue.