I must say that the new funtions are of a verry high toys rush level and i am dissapointed, the waypoints settings are totaly not usefull, if you first have to fly the hole route than it make's no sense to let your drone do it the next time, the old Ph2 had much more practical use to do the settings on the ground and then push "go"
The p.o.i. funtion is olso rubbisch, i can do the flying around a object the same with my flying skills and so it is more fun aswell to do it manuel.
The follow funtion wil not be verry much usefull, in urban areas totaly not usefull, nice to let it show your friends.
I wish the Phantom had the same programmable way as the old Ph2v+  this was a nice extra funtion, only bonus i'll see on the latested FW is the 2.7K possibility on my advanced, but even so i do not see verry much the difference in shooting image compared with the 1080 shooting, in fact when i use 2.7K the transmission signal will disturb a little because of the high bitrate in sending the image to your controller.
So i am dissapointed....

I think that's how far companies can go right now with all the political difficulties.
Don't expect the old ways to continue.  That time is over.

Have you tried the autopilot APP? Right now it's only working with IOS devices.

I did this in about 1/2 hour as a demo and really liked the POI.
Do you think everyone (or more) have the flying skill to do that?
What is it exactly that you need to do? Chances are a 3rd party app will do it.

The waypoints are for people who actually need to use them. Examples:
1. You need to inspect a fence on your farm once every couple weeks. You do the mission and save it.
2. You need to do a POI, but not in a circle. You fly the waypoints and then run it while controlling the camera.

I can see why DJI made it like that.
They don't need someone setting up waypoints then crashing, because they made the height 100 feet and forgot that the tree in between that waypoint and the next is 150 feet tall, then coming here or emailing demanding it is DJI's fault.
You do realize Google Maps is sometimes 2 or more years old, right? Heck I just looked and the street view of the place I work at is dated 2012.
Lots of things can change in 3 years...

Very good that you can do the perfect POI flight manualy. I'm an experienced pilot also and I have done  POI rounds myself, but by far not as perfect as the POI function does automaticaly. So I'm very happy with this function.