Asobo reported a while ago that they may have a solution to my missing aerial images, and this morning they supplied an explanation of what was happening. Although this will probably not be fixed in SU3, they hope to come up with a solution which won't involve developers rebuilding all their aerials. In the meantime, I've managed to rebuild mine so that I finally have aerial imagery. It's been 4 months of not knowing if we'll ever be able to use aerials again. I'm rather chuffed.
However, while rebuilding and updating a few of my airports today, I have decided that the last SU3 beta update is far from acceptable. I've gone from great performance with the previous update, to slow, heavy on the GPU and buggy, with multiple CTDs today, at one point I lost all my settings, but then they returned after a reboot, and the GUI is glitchy, slow, and tends to crash when you click too many buttons too quickly.
If they manage to get a reliable final SU3 update, then great. But there's a lot to fix just since SU2. I suspect that they are pushing out the required specs, which may leave my PC behind. After spending $4000 on telescope bits and pieces, I'm not keen on buying a new PC as well.