I agree wholeheartedly. I was talking to Lady Grey about it a couple of weeks ago and decided I had to give it another, better, go. That's what caused me to start actually implementing yamlui after a similar but less strong bout of motivation struck last year and gave me that idea (sadly that inspiration ran out after trying to write an example ui definition).
That's what I've got so far with this map generator, trees could use some work to render them less uniformly, and stop them being cut off by chunks below and to the right. This map is 256x256 tiles, but it can be infinite if I just figure out a neat way to generate chunks on the fly. That 181 is the fps I'm getting, which compared with about 30 fps on the old unfinished python version with a 200x200 map is quite an improvement...
I'm also still not happy with the rocks, maybe I'll switch back to tiles that are 32x32 pixels instead of 16x16.