I always set home point before each flight, just part of my preflight checklist.

Few weeks ago I used my return to home, like I've done so many times in the past.  It was very sunny and hard to see, it was close and descending I noticed it wasn't retuning to the home point! It was returning to a tree, I attempted to stop it but it was too late and down it went crashing onto the road.

My questions is this, I seen people use home made heli pads. Do they give a you a better chance of landing your drone from where you took off?  

I'm disabled from a spinal injury so decided to start a Aerial Imagery business in my local area, not rich so this drone is my lively hood.
And with DJI Care Refresh turnaround taking so long, I'd rather try anything to not crash again.

Using a launch pad won't have any effect on landing accuracy.
You don't have to let RTH land for you though.
You can cancel RTH at any time and resume control.
It's most likely that you can find a suitable landing spot than some blind programming can,
(GPS accuracy is only going to put your Phantom within about 2 metres)

You don't need to set your home point as the Phantom does that quite well itself and tells you it has done it.
If you want to find out what happened in your incident, the flight data may be able to explain it.
Go to http://www.phantomhelp.com/LogViewer/Upload/
Follow the instructions to upload your flight record.
Come back and post a link to the report it provides and someone here might be able to analyse it and give you an understanding of the cause of the incident.

Look for "Precision Landing" ( Manual - page 17).
There is a thread with the same name: Precision landing.