I mean, the challenge of putting a telescope that far out is a pretty big one.
The New Worlds Imager proposal is a lot simpler to implement and maintain and could be made more powerful by incrementally adding new satellites to the array. Although their proposal doc says "to truly study the surfaces in detail, the way missions like LandSat have of the Earth would take very large apertures, on the order of a square
kilometer. This is unlikely to be become affordable in the foreseeable future" - still building an enormous synthetic aperature with a huge fleet of telescopes vs building a telescope that far out? I dunno... SpaceX is dropping the cost to launch a lot..
And based on their proposal docs, just a few telescopes would be able to image at 100km resolution. Bonus, it'd be able to image a lot more targets since it wouldn't need the sun to be in the right place. https://newworlds.colorado.edu/info/ http://newworlds.colorado.edu/info/documents/gsfc_February%2... https://newworlds.colorado.edu/info/documents/FinalReportNew...