Yes, definately yes! Edit: In reference to CAP saving this game... That was a bit unclear
Here's a different take on this whole discussion.
In a sense, the object dropper kind of killed parts of PC I think in combination with CAP. I'm strictly talking about for the developers now. When I look at PC I see what a lot of you see: copied spots, too much open space etc.
The reason for this isn't directly that they decided to throw in the object dropper and CAP but the fact that they tried to do it while also building PC. They didn't have the time to build a great city like San Vanelona and also come up with a lot of great objects for CAP.
I have no insight in the development process but my guess is that at least some of the guys who designed the city also did stuff that ended up in CAP and object dropper. And they did it more or less at the same time. In my opinion that resulted in having lots of CAP objects in PC and not the other way around.
In SV and NSV there where a ton of different looking trees and benches that where specific for a certain area. In PC, you can see the same tree in many different places and the same texture in different areas. This is probably not laziness but rather a shortage of time and a mentality that said: CAP and PC share a lot of assets so why not take a CAP-approach when building the city, the players can improve it with the object dropper.
In short: CAP helped kill creativity (for the developers). But deadlines was the real culprit.