They had a feature in the recentish past called A Novel Approach that was about trying to make gaming use of non-gaming books.
Unfortunately (well it was unfortunate in my opinion), they chose to take an Approach similar to Silicon Sorcery rather than Giants in the Earth.
It was cool to see an article about Dune in Dragon, but it was disapointing to see monster stats for something kind of like a guild navigator instead of character stats for Paul Atreides.
Yep, I often enjoyed the Giants of the Earth section also. I put many of the characters they put in this section in my world to add a bit of cultural flavor; this was a nice section of various heroes, icons really, and supported many good myths.
It would be nice to see Giants in the Earth come back or for them to redo the old ones and put them in any future Dragon compendiums.