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Which would mean you would have to resort to the system like V-Rally 2 had instead, where you map out the course design beforehand and then the game uses that outline to determine how to best render that track according to how you designed it and you simply have to wait while it does so. That may very well be how the GPS portion that PD talked about will actually work; and that's how the GT5 Course Maker seemed to work as well (with the conceit that you didn't actually have control over what it did) since it took notably longer to load a course maker track than it did any regular track, the wait time was unaffected by hard drive speed, and the space as saved to your PS3 was very small.
Much simpler, but in no way as computationally intensive. You're conflating the same separate things that Nixxon was doing above when he was flailing around to argue why the Far Cry 4 editor wasn't comparable because it wasn't a driving sim. All you have to do for a movie upload (ignoring sound) is dump whatever happened to be in the VRAM at any given frame into a video container, then upload the resulting file to YouTube after the race is done. If you aren't worried about compression in the pursuit of max performance, it's incredibly straightforward to do, but that's the rub: The YouTube video upload feature had to run while the race was going on. That's tacking a ton of overhead directly on the CPU for a couple of games that already really struggle to achieve decent performance in certain situations; and that's even if you don't bother doing any optimization or compression (which also means you will max out the hard drive writes to try and lower CPU usage). Add to that that PD probably rendered graphics with the CELL as much as possible, and it gets even worse; not to mention the upload times and the humongous hard drive hit as a result of a raw video dump. The reason that the Forza 4 upload feature only allowed such a short clip was likely because that was as long as they could spare before game performance tumbled because of using up some resource (probably RAM); and the reason that the PS4 and XBone allow the same thing with no problem is because the GPU in both shares the architecture with a chipset that has a video encoder built into the hardware itself. The track maker doesn't run when the races are happening.
That isn't to say that the amount of freedom provided by ColouredBadger's example above would be possible, since that is a fully realtime terraformer and track creator and means you do have to render the track while you are editing it; but allowing you to lay out a track area and then generating/rendering the track from that would be taxing insofar as the more complex of a track you designed, the longer the game would take to generate it for you to play on. The only relationship it has to the game itself when you play it is if the game allowed you to do too much with scenery or automatically placed itself in a way that wasn't efficient; but it isn't like GT6 doesn't already have problems with that when playing on the tracks PD made.
Even assuming PD didn't just have it generate the track in realtime like they seemed to in GT5 (which would mean the amount of space it would take up would be practically meaningless, just like race replays are; but PD truthfully might save the track as an actual file to increase performance so the track could be better broken down into chunks when driving on it), why would a user created track take up much more space than a PD-created track? It would be less efficiently designed than a PD track in terms of texture and scenery usage, but it would also almost certainly be of lower quality on an asset level as well simply because the amount of control wouldn't be the same.
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Keep hoping!
