Generative systems often look crappy to start.

No Man's Sky started off significantly, embarrassingly below what the original vision was.

This was caught well in the "jurassic park harmonica" meme, which makes me guffaw every time I watch it.

But No Man's Sky, after years of iteration, persisting and playtesting and improving, really did get close to the original vision.

Generative systems have to have some kind of real-world selection pressure to tune them.

In the meantime, there's a trough of crappy output.

No Man's Sky used a traditional marketing playbook, and the high expectations almost killed it out of the gate.

Dwarf Fortress got through that by doing the illegible stealth playbook.

For a long time, Dwarf Fortress looked like nothing at all!

There wasn't even a GUI for many years!