Sounds like it to me. The Heat-map system for biologicals worked fine in the Alpha, so I don't know why they're saying it "caused confusion"!!!! This seems like a massive backwards step to me. They're just trying to "dumb it down" for the casuals, to the detriment of everyone else.
I'm betting there were still some lingering problems that ultimately were decided to be show stoppers, so they re-evaluated the utility of the heatmap and decided that it wasn't worth pursuing further. I don't think they were "dumbing it down".
I initially thought that generation of these maps should be easy; the maps would just be a representation of the actual map used to scatter these elements, but then realized that the lime-green ball was actually that. In too many situations, the rule was just to evenly coat a planet. The issue wasn't with the heat map getting displayed properly, because it actually was. The problem with the heat map was that it revealed that too many planets had no diversity.
"But, what about when they fixed the lime-green ball?" This could have been a hand-edited value tweaking that specific planet. With the intention of a proper fix down the pipe, manual tweaks could produce actual diversity, but manually tweaking every single body in the galaxy would be impossible. Plus, it didn't deal with the situations where there actually was supposed to be a uniform distribution of elements.
The proper fix would be to actually generate where these elements should be placed, then generate a heatmap based on their actual placement. But, that would be pretty process intensive, as there is no halfway point when you just randomly scatter elements evenly across a surface. At what point would you do this? If you did it during hyperspace, then it could make loading time unreasonable. If you did it when you were getting close to a body, it could cause a noticeable drop in framerate, or still be incomplete when you reached the point where you could view it.
Another solution would be to make the algorithm better at generating diversity, but this could cause other issues, especially if the rules used for this are also used at other phases in surface generation. Procedural generation can be tough, and making tweaks to the forge will cause ripples throughout the galaxy.
During the development process, they had to reach a "finished" state for the Forge, so that all of the folks who handled the hand-built parts of the galaxy could go to work.
What we are left with is the common denominator of all of the maps. The more interesting ones, where there is actual diversity and variation in their density get hidden so that the significantly more common uniform scattering is not as obvious.
