I did try it out in color on my camera, just looked very bland, no contrast at all :| I understand your perspective, but I really wanted to emphasis the texture and harshness of the rocks.
There's so many images because I like properly seamless panoramas and having the sheer amount of images enables the stitching program to be more "intelligent" in a way. It didn't take very long actually. It takes around 125-150 images to make my Mac work hard to stitch/blend.