Why do people spend so much time working on administrative subdivision?
What are people using these maps for? In timelines they almost universally are used to show changing international borders, very rarely have I seen many timelines go into deep detail about administrative divisions and the organisation of townships. That would require an absurd level of detail for alternate history.
Most of the majors maps, apart from WorldA are filled with people posting threads where they minutely go through the tiniest of subdivisions of their country. This seems next to useless for a world map. The only time people need that level of detail is when they're talking about that country in particular, and then they'll just use that.
On top of this internal admin divisions change all the time and quickly go out of date even when international borders don't change. Most uses of these admin divisions would presumably be well used by the many already existing maps produced by the governments of countries of their own internal divisions. Or those on Wikipedia.
And yet, so many man hours are put into these amazingly crafted maps and no one has even completed a 2019 map of countries, never mind a 1945 or 1939 map. You know, maps that people would want to use for wargames or a timeline.
I can understand people working on the coast, people working on the details of rivers, islands, or on topography. All of these are useful on a global world map. International borders, disputed areas and rebellions. I can understand all of that. But what's the use of administrative divisions? As you get more smaller and smaller they get more and more useless. What are people using these maps for? Am I an idiot? I feel like I must be missing something obvious because the whole map threads are filled with admin divisions and yet I never see them used.
Whereas I always see maps of 1939 or 1945 or whatever, modified for whatever alternate history scenario it is.
I see websites like omniatlas and where is this here? Surely people are interested in a consistently mapped timeline of the world, with campaigns, international changes, etc. Not admin levels where consistency is irrelevant since you only ever care about one country.
Edit: Also another reason you might not even want admin levels on your map. If you're showing a map of your timeline and you use a map from here, you might be confident about the international situation but the internal situation of every country? The exact path every country followed that led to their current internal borders? No one knows that, so people have to waste time erasing all that hard work. Which makes me wonder why people don't post layered maps like svgs more often here. Pngs are fine for final products but even a blank updated map posted here should have a:land layer, a coast layer, and a border layer.