If it were that simple, we would have done it years ago. I don’t particularly enjoy map checking 10,000 summit associations, which is why I try to find quicker ways. But when I do end up map checking, it’s immediately apparent the issues that will occur.
The issue is not P150 or P200 or P8848. The issue is determining which of two (or more) summits which have similar heights and the same parent is the correct one, when the underlying surface model (all to Ron’s points) is inaccurate.
Remember, prominence is a relative measure - it compares surrounding terrain against higher terrain, resulting in some interesting second order effects. It is not an absolute measure. Imagine an island with 5 summits on it. The highest points of each summit measured by SRTM or GLO30 is respectively, 201, 203, 200, 204 and 207m. All of these have an accuracy of +/- 10m. Each summit requires slogging through jungle to get to, and the island is surrounded by cliffs 30m high (so the key saddle between each is at most 177m below). Only 1 summit can qualify in this (P200) situation. Which one?
Well, it’s obvious, it must be the 207m summit. Except, according to government mapping that some poor person had to head up with his survey-grade GPS, that summit is actually 199m high. So, it’s not that one, it must be the 204m summit. That has a comms tower and building on it which is affecting the radar, it’s only 170m from the ground as determined by our survey sherpa. Can’t be that then. 203m? It’s a jungle, so the tree cover can also impact things, that’s 198m as per the government mapping. The 201m summit is measured at 206m as per mapping and the 200m summit is, surprise, surprise, 200m exactly.
Now this is a contrived example, but imagine that happens in ~5% of cases (a ridgeline instead of an island, usually), across a 10,000 candidate association. That’s 500 summits that would absolutely need manually checking and possibly correcting later. Note that none of that has anything to do with P200 or P150. I could easily contrive the same slightly smaller island with the same problems at P150. It’s because prominence is relative to itself and other surrounding terrain.
Better data like LIDAR does make this possible. Centimetric vertical accuracy is near enough for our kind of work, and it’s usually spot on, although I recall even Simon finding issues in EA with LIDAR data getting confused with the trig points they have there and finding the wrong summit. SRTM is not the dataset to be searching through for this sort of information.
The good news is there’s a lot of operators launching SAR based satellites for digital terrain modelling and this may change in coming years, but we’re not there yet.