It has but I am hoping that a paper accomplishing the task with machine learning will move the goalpost (it has happened in other areas of computer vision).

> move the goalpost

I don't think I understand your expression there: do you mean that "the problem of producing relief bitmaps from elevation data could lead to new achievements in our knowledge relevant to Neural Nets"? I am not sure why.

If you mean, more consistently with your original parent post, "lead to improvements in the past traditional techniques towards the same goal" - I would say that I don't see much space for leaping better results than those already possible.

I mean that results that would have previously been considered good enough for classical methods could now be considered improvable leading to renewed work into application of traditional methods to this subject.