Honestly...comparing a game based on closed off levels that have been entirely handcrafted, prebaked and loaded into memory before the game session launches against a true to scale planetary environment that has to be not only rendered, but also generated from scratch in real time on the GPU is a no go from the start.
Of course FD need to generate and display things over extreme distances. That's the whole point...that you can go anywhere. Will this affect how much they can show in terms of up close details, yes of course, but if FD are smart they are also planning for all the other stuff coming later. They need to leave some performance room for when they start to populated the surfaces with all the other stuff: grass, bushes, water, trees, clouds, atmospheric scattering and so on...things that a game like Battlefront has since that's the type of planets their fights takes place on.
This isn't really comparing like for like...
It is, because that's not how game engines work.
The geometry in BF is all hand-crafted, sure, but that's only a small part of what's making the game look good. The textures are superb, and good textures are one of the least complicated things to make. Variety helps significantly with that, and ED's texture variety is sorely lacking. The lighting is superb, and as we all know the lighting in ED is ham-fisted and seemingly of low priority to them. Specular fading, AA, particle effects, etc... None of these are out of the reach of Frontier's artists, they simply aren't prioritized. Seeing long distances is fine, but rendering with high quality at long distances is counter-productive, even if it's impressive. It removes a level of realism and wastes resources. Lowering the quality of assets at long distances and covering it with effects that naturally occur due to people not having telescopic, perfect eyesight allows you to dramatically improve the quality of closer assets. DOF, SSAO, parity, etc...
PG can, has been, and Frontier will eventually use it to create geometry in the players' immediate area that is just as impressive as Frostbyte's pre-baked assets. Believe it or not PG is the more resource-efficient method for this, it takes more work to polish the PG algorithms to create a quality environment than it does to hand-craft a small amount of assets. The benefit of PG, the fact that it can be repeated infinitely, does not have any benefit to games with isolated environments and thus it's cheaper and easier to do it manually. However, by not putting in the effort to take these huge aspects of the game to their finished form, and leaving them half-baked until some undefined later date, Frontier is hamstringing themselves in several ways, reducing both their player-base and thus their income and creating more work as they go back later to patch gaps in their older work at a time when they don't have the budget to do it due to a reduced income.
You've been around. I don't have to tell you that half-finished features that never get fleshed out are a trademark of the development of this game. This is just another example.
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