Having skimmed through the thread, I'm both impressed and disappointed at the breadth of knowledge shown here. It's a shame that this kind of discussion is discouraged as being "thinking too hard" or people being too lazy to put their feelings into words.





Mapping, once you reach a certain point, is a balancing act. The more experienced a mapper gets, the more they realize that, like in many craft skills, the basics you learn as a newbie are much more strict than they need to be to encourage you to understand how mapping works as a big picture. This is why new mappers get so confused when they see people like me, monstrata, or HW basically going "fuck the police" and doing weird shit and pulling it off - because we already know the basics and are intentionally defying them in ways we (generally) know we can succeed at.



This is why I'm such a bitch about "flow" and "consistency" mapping. They're extremely powerful tools and rulesets for new mappers to use. They make maps that play well, look good, and, not-entirely-coincidentally, give 'abnormal' amounts of pp. But when you get right down to it, when you represent a piece of music with the same tools as the last dozens and dozens of musical pieces, you lose sight of the music itself. This can basically be summarized in the simple response "Just because it plays better, doesn't mean it fits the music better."





Experienced mappers know what I'm talking about. The more you map, the more insight you get into how most music is structured. You start seeing the same musical patterns over and over. It's very easy to fall to temptation and just start mapping the same musical patterns across different tracks in the same way. Experience is about knowing how to manipulate the basic patterns and structure that fit pretty much anything to fit this particular musical piece. Of course, for a generic drum'n'bass track, or a generic anime OP, it's borderline impossible to 'leave the rails' of the music, as it were, but people try anyway, and rarely ever succeed.



So basically what I'm trying to say here is "looking good is nice and all but mappers should remember they're making shit for people to play". Mappers tend to get into circlejerks over how pretty and aesthetically perfect their maps can get and lose sight of the fact that hey, we're playing a music game - "music" is literally half of the entire point. I've noticed a major trend in recent years where mappers were mapping for other mappers - this seems so incredibly backward I can barely believe it.





tl;dr Looking good is nice and all, but in many cases a map is fine even if it's not aesthetically perfect, in fact this can cause it to be more iconic with the musical track it comes along with. The handful of decent mappers and modders at present time put far too much stock into the raw mechanics of mapping and lose sight of what it means to play this game. "Mappers" and "Players" have become distanced from one another and that is quite sad. Also I ended up ranting.





tl;dr the tl;dr: generic maps should look generic. weird music should look weird. boring music should look boring. people are making all maps generic regardless of music type. makes shiirn sad.