Yeah, the centralization aspect is a big turnoff for me. I'd thought about the direct-manipulation issue (the rather crude visualization of skeletonization I linked below benefits a lot from it) but not the multiple-projections problem. Can't you put the entire state in one cell and then create multiple cells that render some reduced dimensionality projection of it? Or do you mean that there's no way to factor out the aggregation of three such projections into a reusable unit?

I recently walked my girlfriend through your explorable on populating landscapes with Perlin noise btw. It was great.