Peter wrote:
This is probably because placing free text so it doesn’t clutter or overlap other stuff is an immensely complex software task, whereas a clever human can do it easily.
Overlapping is an inherit danger. Read a accident report recently about a digital map being identified as causal factor where the obstacle height was overlapped with another section of the map, making 3300’ read as 1300’. Interestingly this was with rastered images that were stitched together I believe.
The impact of scaling and cluttering may result in something that you like, or something you don’t like. It depends a lot on design choices made. An interesting study is this comparison between Google and Apple maps. http://www.justinobeirne.com/essay/cartography-comparison
