I understand where you are coming from Doofas, and have observed...

I understand where you are coming from Doofas, and have observed the same in the course of my work day to day. These things do not materially affect the way we benefit from the images however, and I suspect many other customers would be in the same boat. The primary value is in the high frequency and recent captures IMO.

Now this comes with some of the drawbacks you mention, as if you're shooting surveys every three or four weeks, and doing the shoot of an entire capital city and surrounds in one day, you can't too be picky about the amount of light (overcast or sunny), the time of day or season (shadows) etc.

If you are flying a once in 6/12/24 months, you could pick your times and days, shoot over several days etc.

It's like real estate photography compared to fine art landscape or high end architectural photography. There are markets for both and the quality tolerance for each are vastly different.

At the end of the day, a perfect photo of a cleared piece of dirt is useless to someone who wants to see the building that is actually half way through completion on that piece of land.

All of this said, IMO the resolution/clarity etc in nearmap images, although sometimes variable, is on average much higher than what you see in google earth or online maps. . I can often see power and phone lines going into houses. Try that with GE.

The winter photos are usually not lit as well due to the lower angle of the sun however this clearly shows the worst case sunlight angles for solar installers and architects etc.