Allow me to vent some mapper vitriol.
The locations of NS can be anywhere that's futuristic. This can be on spaceships, space stations, outposts on planets or moons, hell, astoroids if you want. They could, but haven't been yet, in cities, hell, anything goes as long as it fits in with the general mood of NS.
And to be honest, if you don't like the maps, prove you can do better. Don't bitch about them, show the mappers how it's done. If you can't, i'm sorry, but you have absolutely no right to comment. You don't know the months of work it takes to make an NS map, you don't know the hours of boring compiling, the hours of optimisation and bug testing. You don't know jack unless you're a mapper.
The new maps are looking great, and i defy anyone that badmouths ns_ayumi. It takes a high standard to get a map accepted as official, and it takes a hell of a lot of work. Show some damned respect and shut the hell up. This is why Relic25 left the NS community entirely and turned his back on the dev team, because of people whining about ns_bast. If you don't like a map, don't play it, but don't have the audacity to :Ding whine about it, if you, yourself, can't do any better.