This is true, but remember that if you do it this way, you are giving up a couple of the advantages of symbol catalogs:

• When not importing them, you don't automatically get the 4 resolutions created either. This means CC3+ will use the highest (and only) quality available for your symbols regardless of zoom level. This can impact performance
• You don't get to set useful properties like which sheet they should go on or things like symbol groups or smart symbols.

FT3 have limited support for adding details outside the actual planet. But you can use the Image Overlay. Should be a separate menu for it. From the overlay window, you can create new overlays to use as a drawing surface, and the Overlay Paint tool lets you paint on the overlay.

Not that the size of the overlay is it's resolution, so to avoid having country-sized pixels, you probably need to bump this up a bit from the default selected size of 512x256 when you create a new overlay.

You can export the overlay to an image and work in it in an external editor if you want more advanced painting tools, and then import it back into FT3.

Use the Order desk email from the contact page. That's a regular email address which you don't have to have a user to use.

When you import symbols using Symbols -> Import pngs... it will do a folder at a time (note that it does not do subfolders, only the content of the folder you point it to)