Hey Enablethen!
I'll admit that it's really difficult to make a good Real Life or LOAP map. The difficulty, to me, is that the map is actually very content heavy, so you have to do a lot of things by hand and just make a lot of small interesting things around the entire map.
Still, the level editors that Blizzard puts out are amazing, they're powerful, and most importantly they're user interface tools and you don't need to type out code to make a level! It's tough work, but when Blizzard has already come like, 50% of the way, it's up to us to pull our own weight if we really want a great map with our name on it.
MoronSonOfBoron and I actually released an unprotected version of our RLFM map because we knew that there would probably be other people who wanted to learn how we made our map, and then maybe they would go on and make it better... just like GrandKaiser on this forum has done!