Planet always knew that the resolution on the doves would be low. The advantage of a fleet of low spatial resolution satellites is that you can get much better

Planet always knew that the resolution on the doves would be low. The advantage of a fleet of low spatial resolution satellites is that you can get much better temporal resolution - imaging areas every month, week, or even every day has unique value, even if you don't image them at better than ~4 meters. Here are a few examples: It's easy to get an image of (say) Haiti right _after_ the earthquake - you know the disaster just happened. But it's really nice to have an image of Haiti right _before_ the earthquake so you know where the damage happened, so you want baseline imagery of every city in the world to better direct post-disaster relief efforts. The more up-to-date, the better. It's good for identifying areas where illegal logging operations are happening _right now_ - Count the trees in at-risk areas on a daily basis to track illegal logging groups. Or image every port on the planet to identify international shipping trends and monitor loading / unloading efficiencies. Or image every soybean plantation in the world to check crop health. [insert crop type above for the ag industry you're interested in] Or image every major glacier every day and correlate it with temperature data to gather more scientific data about climate change and sea level predictions. All these are simultaneously achievable with a flock of >100 3U cubesats taking ~4m resolution imagery. They are not possible with a half dozen ~1M resolution conventional satellites... Maybe you could do one of the above things. There's a lot of value there - the more conventional satellites add to it, for sure, but they're not going to totally replace it anytime soon.