I still think there must be some way to do a story in procedural worlds. Just because nobody did it right yet, does not mean it is impossible. It is just not possible with run-of-the-mill solutions.
I quite agree. It's just not a casual or a small undertaking. Making this game PLUS procedural story at the same time proved impossible. Doing the game itself, and then procedural story as part of an expansion later... it's
plausible, at the worst. We were more or less in the position of being able to do both halfway or one really well, so we chose to focus on the game at the expense of the story elements we had at one time had ambitions of doing.
Where it will go over the next years largely depends on what players are most interested in, and what we can come up with in terms of ways to overcome challenges that nobody else has really solved before (to my knowledge).