I'd like to be able to make my own universes in Celestia using stcs and ssc files only and I don't want existing stars to be there - basically I want an empty universe to fill with my own stars. To do this, I'd have to get rid of the stars.dat file, but when last I looked Celestia doesn't run without it, and if you try to edit it down to zero (or few) stars using something like CStarConv it crashes.
Making the program run without a stars.dat doesn't seem like something that would be too difficult to implement - isn't stars.dat basically just a shorthand binary replacement for all those stc files anyway? And if we could remove it and repopulate the universe with our own set of stars and planets then I think Celestia would become REALLY useful for visualisation of scifi universes.
(and maybe it'd be nice to have a random 'fixed stars' sphere or something to put in the background so the entire universe didn't look like it only had about 10 stars in it, but I guess one could do that in image post-processing
)