About 13% of the people who voted in the poll is over 50 years old, so that's not many. Besides, only about 1300 of about 177.000 registered users have voted; less than 1%. And there are probably more players of ATS and/or ETS2 than those 177.000 registered users. So, how representative is this poll? I don't think you can draw a conclusion like 'many of the ATS players now are over 50 years old'.
But that's ok. Because it's about the time it will take to create the complete US in a smaller scale, like 1:10 for instance. But how important is that? How important is it to drive from coast to coast? Personally I of course will take some jobs from coast to coast. But after I have done that for a few times I very likely will go back to much shorter jobs (max 1000 miles). So for me it's not really that important to be able to drive from coast to coast.
Besides all this, there are two time factors: how much time will it take to create 1:10 scale maps? And how much time do I want to play the game? I don't care how much time it will take for the maps being created; that's something SCS should be thinking about. As a player I'm only interested in how much time I want to put in the game. And here it comes: this is not dependent of scale. If I want to play for 2 hours, I just play for about two hours. I choose a job I can complete in two (realtime) hours.
In a 1:20 scale this would mean that I can do a job from, say, Los Angeles to Salt Lake City. And in a 1:10 scale I can take a job from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. In a 1:10 scale map I can't drive as many miles as in a 1:20 scale map, in the same time. But that's ok. Because a 1:10 scale map is much more detailed than a 1:20 scale map. So, in the end in a 1:10 scale map I will drive twice as little miles, but at the same time, there will be twice as much details. Like twice as much intersections, twice as much marked and unmarked towns, etc.