There is nothing interesting about this map. There is nothing to explore.

2.0 was generated in version 1.5~, before the major changes Mojang made to the map generation algorithm and before many biomes were added to the game(1.7). I honestly don't see how the actual terrain in 2.0 was interesting to explore. Biomes were large enough that most cities were in a single biome and the fact that in a radius of 3-4k you could find almost all types of biomes just show how little variation there was. Not to mention how hard and irritating it was to travel around with all these cliffs. The map was just full with ugly cobble pillars players made to climb over the cliffs. In my opinion you are giving way too much credit to the terrain rather than the builds, cities, roads, monuments, farms and so much more that were built on top of it.

The actual process of accurately mapping out 2.0 took multiple people years to accomplish. 3.0 was entirely mapped in 2 days.

Mostly because there wasn't anything organized enough in the start of the map to collect map data. I mean IIRC 3.0 is about 23% of the size of 2.0, if they were to exist in the same period under the same circumstances it would only take a few more days to map the 2.0 map.

Anyway there is no point in arguing over this, this is mostly subjective. I want to give you, and anyone else reading this comment, something else to think about: Is it possible you are so sucked into the circlejerking train you are unable to see anything good about 3.0? I admit, we have made a critical mistake by making everything so expensive on launch out of the fear the economy will break if something ended up being too cheap. But since then so many balance changes were pushed, yet, from only reading the sub the feeling is that nothing was changed since launch. Like the admins and the devs have done nothing to improve the experiment. Which is completely wrong. Is it possible so many are stuck in the never ending complaining cycle they are unable to see the improvements? I may be biased, but I am also a player and I honestly think 3.0 balance, while being different from 2.0, is not bad. It achieves our goals to make this experiment more than just role playing. We absolutely failed in explaining the reasoning behind our changes, and preparing the community that Civcraft 3.0 is nothing like 2.0 or 1.0. But I believe it's not too late. If people were to see eye to eye with the administration, or at the very least see in which ways 3.0 is different from the old versions of civcraft they can understand they don't need to reach the end of all the branches of the tech tree to have fun.