I do agree with you there; Tampa-Orlando is a short route on flat land that for the majority of the trip has very few things in the way of the tracks. You should see the eminent domain cases the California team is struggling with just to get the train from Anaheim to Los Angeles! The Bay Area route is also facing similar struggles through the affluent suburbs around Stanford (which is richly ironic from a political standpoint). With only five planned stations in wide open spaces, Florida HSR will be an easy thing to get rolling, in theory.
But the obstacles are that central Florida has not embraced rail transportation in any meaningful way, and there is no real precedence set for it.
And most interestingly, the Tampa-Orlando commuter market is so small that no scheduled airline has even attempted to fly a small 50 seat regional jet or turboprop back and forth once or twice a day to make a few bucks off of that market. There are only two Amtrak trains per day between the two cities, part of the long distance Silver Star or Silver Meteor service up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Judging from the small and sad conditions of the Tampa and Orlando Amtrak stations, the passenger numbers on the Tampa-Orlando route are not big.
The danger is that Florida HSR builds this line because it's cheap and easy to do, and a week after opening day when the mayors and marching bands go away it starts sending empty trains back and forth because there's no market for the thing. Then it's held up around the country as an example of government waste and pork, and Tallahassee suddenly has a political hot potato on their hands over how they are going to subsidize the daily operation for the next 50 years.
But the fact remains, there is still a great deal of work to do on the plan. Some station renderings would be nice to see. Particularly the WDW station on Disney property.
