It's great to see so much interest in the project again, well done folks.
Something we really have to decide on ASAP is whether we are going to swap to a 1x heightmap or continue with a 2x heightmap and perhaps it's time for a poll to get that out of the way.
Both 1x and 2x archives are already available for absolutely anyone to download in the other
thread, complete with the originally placed NPCs, placed buildings and wilderness meshes (dragged over from Galadrielle's content converter - meshes which we can only use short-term) and all the LOD files.
If we're going to do a proper TES4 mod, really we should region generate. I know some people have problems with the way it works and maybe the region generator works betters on certain types of landscapes, but when I region generated on the 3x Cyrodiil heightmap (that's 9 times the surface area of the original game) the outcome worked really well, so it's possibly a matter of finding good presets - in that example I used Bethesda's originals. But we can't region generate without enough having a sufficient variety of relevant meshes in the first place and as things have been tough here of late we'd ended up thinking of replacing the TES3 meshes with our own, since the placement ESP already has every single building, tree, rock etc ready placed in exactly their original places, saving a tremendous amount of time.
And landscape textures could be region generated too; the original Vvardenfell landscape only has single texture layers, spread over large TES3 sized squares, so when converted to TES4 this looks just as clumpy (though sometimes more so because the textures don't automatically blend in TES4 - Bethesda introduced layers for that and the Oblivion textures aren't always as smooth a colour/pattern transition from each other). That said, with the placed content on the land it doesn't notice nearly so much and the TES4 textures are already 4x as detailed (and with 3D grass in many places) - if we region generate the textures we'll have to mark out all the cobbled and dirt roads again which means more effort and delay to the project's progress.
Really, if we're going to get the mod moving in the speediest and most instantly rewarding way we can get down to recreating those fabulous towns in a new way, we should work with the placed content on a 1x heightmap and keep the converted landscape textures. Every settlement (including ruins, forts, tombs caves) are already there and people can set about swapping those and building their own without any guess work as to their original location was.
We could conceivably region generate the wilderness content at
any later stage if desired, it doesn't have to form a priority right now, but to avoid wasted effort we should decide whether we're going to do that before we perform the alternative of swapping any TES3 wilderness content for TES4 content.