Map image changed for the worse

[nordlicht]

...but I was also hoping to learn a little more about how RouteConverter interacts with the online satellite imagery from the host sources...

Search for a hidden folder .routeconverter on your machine, in its subfolder tileservers you will find mapservers.xml and overlayservers.xml. If you want to set up your own map sources create a file userservers.xml alongside these xml files using the schema of the mapservers.xml file.