I honestly think with the gaming community that there are many who just don't feel complete if they cannot complain about something.
Example:
1. "Ugh the game lags", so we get an update with much better detail but lower quality textures. So people complain OMG my textures ; ;
2. "We want FFXI jobs (BLM,WHM,DRG,WAR,etc)", So we get many of those jobs. So people complain that we don't have THF, Nin, SAM, etc.

I could go on forever on these examples. This is just another example.

My understanding on the complaint with copy and paste was that you would pass and area and run a little ways then pass that same area again but in a different place. That was a reasonable complaint.

However do you actually expect them to make 1000s of individual cacti? seriously?
Just about every game out there reuses land pieces. The trick is that when you go from area to area they are not all placed in the same place but just rotated or something. Also as long as there are variances in the land much of this will not matter.