The current map scale isn't a result of SCS going into a room, twiddling their mustaches, and going "hmmm how can we put as little work into our products as possible." It's a result of them creating German Truck Simulator as a random project to make ends meet, porting it into ETS2 expecting it to flop, and accidentally making a game so iconic that it's still receiving updates 10 years later. ETS2 was never planned to be a long-term project, but it ended up being the foundation for basically everything SCS has done since then, and SCS is basically stuck with the decisions they made for it. And as its sibling, ATS is broadly consistent with it.
When they sat down and made ATS, they considered 1:35 for a very simple reason: people were going to want the contiguous 48 as soon as humanly possible, and would pan the game until it happened. Anyone who was around for the first few states should recall that this was a completely legitimate concern: people wanted the lower 48 now, not in 15 years! They ultimately changed course for parity with ETS2, but in doing so, they dramatically extended the time it would take for the lower 48 to finish... which, for many people, is still too long. And when people aren't complaining about how long it's taking, they're complaining about how expensive the final product will be, which is presumably something also impacted by the rescale.
How much more time do you think people would realistically be willing to wait? How much more money do you think people would realistically be willing to pay? I would love a 1:10 map, but the fact is, there's a realistic chance I wouldn't even live to see it And that's with me probably being one of the younger users here. 1:20 is probably the best compromise between passable quality and actually finishing the product at a remotely acceptable pace. 1:15 is probably the hard upper limit on what is actually possible, given a developer and an audience of the size that ATS has. Anything beyond that is fantasy at best and delusion at worst. (A rescale at this point, by the way, is similarly unreasonable. The ATS map is too interconnected for something like "parts of it are 1:15, parts of it are 1:20" to be feasible, so you'd need to change it all at once. This would take several DLCs worth of effort and not even directly make money. And even then, with how clear the difference is between pre-rescale and post-rescale roads, you might as well be committing to redoing half these states from the ground up.)
And for the extra-funny clowns voting 1:1 or 1:5, there are only two situations where this can be done.
- AI-generated mapping capability that far exceeds what's currently possible
- Complete abandonment of the coast-to-coast format (in ATS) or the international-oriented format (ETS2) in exchange for a laser focus on specific mega-cities (at 1:1) or states (at 1:5).
There's probably a market for something like Los Angeles Truck Simulator, mind... but it'd be a completely different product from ATS, and frankly, it would require much more in-depth gameplay, as well. It's... probably better to leave that for someone else.
One last thing: America isn't special. There are small states in the northeast, yes. But Europe has small countries - even smaller, in fact. And some of them aren't even in ETS2. I can pretty much guarantee that ATS will never suffer an omission on that scale. If anyone should be begging for a rescale, it's the ETS2 board - not us.