Ok... Lets see... You want a layout that is a world of 'gravel with puddles', one type of tree, using a double track station without any point levers for a yard, cars always going at 100KMH, some hedges, and of course no actual buildings other than that station, with a single locomotive to run on it, no signals, no signs, and no sky, and no people, only 4 cars... Wow, wonderful layout... I know, you would then complain about the lack of content for that layout!
Now, this is an example of WHY there isn't much content included...
I've just built a waiting shelter... In 04, would have been fairly simple. Get a photo of some corrugated iron, make that up into a simple texture for the walls, make a texture for the door, and then apply that to a simple '2D' object (box with a hole in front and another box for the door, and some boxes for the inside frame). In 09, to make it look even half like the new content, I've had to spend 3 days on it so far... That included making a high detail model, then making the lower detail model, then mapping the texture out, then do a test render, change some of the mapping, re-do the test render, then once I've done this a couple of times to get it to bake the normal map properly, I have to then go through and do a test 'shadow' texture render, go through and tweak and retest a few times to make that comes out well, then leave the computer to bake the texture for a good 40 minutes. Then, once that is done, set up the object for export. Then make 2-3 levels of LOD. Export them, then test in game, then tweak the model to look good in game. As I said, 3 days work so far. Still need to tweak it to look good, including a specular map... So, for just a SINGLE SIMPLE building, it's probably going to take about 5 days...
For a locomotive, it takes me about 1 month to get one working using the older method (build the game model only, and bake the shadows off that, then make the normals map in photoshop). I would expect a locomotive for 09 will take about 2-3 months to build...
So, would you be willing to pay for the amount of time it takes to build these? It would mean paying extra, since Auran will have to make them... I would expect, to get a layout of a similar style to the built-in 'Australia' layout to raise the cost to a minimum of $70 AUD... Purely because the artists would need to be paid to create ALL of the content required...
Now, as to the sessions having instructions in a 'LOTE'. Have you considered why these were included? They are called legacy items... At one point Auran didn't even want to include these items... They are old items that have been included, with minimal work done (more work will = more cost of the product) so that they will show as non faulty in CM2 but may not be 100% perfect in game. Auran did state that not all content works... They DID state it was included. Now, as I just said... These items are legacy items, included so as to prevent missing dependencies because of a missing built-in item. Would you be willing to pay extra so that these can be fixed, as well as have more broken features elsewhere, or would you prefer to have it as is? And don't say 'but Auran should fix this, because it's broken'... There are many more important, real, bugs that they need to focus on, as well as implementing new features in various updates... Would you prefer to see the 'baseboard hole' error fixed, or to have some content changed so that they are in English (thus breaking them for people who can read that language)?
Zec