Yeah I agree, its a lot of resources for a minor thing. I was always disappointed in carrionfields when ever I came across anything that was familiar to me, I've never read the WoT book series so although its jarringly obviously from another universe I'm ok with it. Same goes with the Hobbit/LOTR stuff, yeah it was cool to find it the first time, but then it sort of felt like cheap and gimmicky and I am glad they have changed them all. I disagree it seems with most people, Carrionfields is too small, and too centric, I saw a lot of area progress in a short period of time, and maybe that enthusiasm will continue to expand the world. Making the world smaller is a huge mistake though, in my opinion, always growing is way more fun.

Designing an area from scratch is difficult, but its hardly difficult to design an area in the vein of carrionfields, when you have soo much source material to work with lol. If you want to introduce totally new factions or what ever you only need to do it one at a time generally, using an existing faction/factions in adversarial positions wrap the lore together.