That would make sense if Google Maps wasn't 18yrs old, but I don't really have opinions on that sort of thing as I've never worked for a large tech company on a mature product. Maybe there's not much motivation to try that hard after a certain time.
Yes, I think I should have made my point better: if you can't dogfood it and the population affected is small people just don't care, especially if there is zero economic incentive. It sucks that it is like that.
Interestingly they're not far (relative to myself in Australia) from Scripps in San Diego .. the ocean research company famous for dolphin research and not ocean tempreture mapping to acoustically track submarines in the cold war.
Scripps authored some pretty decent open source CLI unix mapping software that you could pipe together to do all manner of things data presentation wise that dates back to the 1980s at least.
That could handle line lengths across the 180 longitude line .. they thought globally and ran sensors from California to Hawaii to the South China Sea (and elsewhere in the world).
Even the original Sydney-based digital mapping start-up Where 2 Technologies that spawned Google Maps (not the 3D Google Earth) could handle those calculations (as I recall, they even pulled some libraries from people I worked with) - I'd have to check but I believe Where 2 shared some DNA with ERMapper (Perth, W.Australia based global resource mapping company).
At some point post aquisition they must have rewritten | simplified assumptions and never availed themselves of US open software paid for by their own tax dollars.
