At least with my experience being new to the Phantom, during my as yet small number of "test" flights, I've noted that while manually landing the P4 can pretty easily be made very lightly indeed, with not much effort. RTH and auto land descent speed is a bit higher than I'd like, particularly if not on grass on a landing pad. Considering the capability of the VPS and sonar, surely this can be done, or even allow a custom descent rate to be set by the pilot below a certain altitude. I'd class this as a needful thing, and if we ever see new P4 firmware this could be done...

I think it has to do a firm landing just in case there is a gust of wind, don't think it is ever hard enough to cause damage, but if you know that it is safe to land gently then you can push the throttle up a little as it comes in to land.

The other reason for a firm landing is that the vision positioning system can't work if it is too close to the ground as the ground becomes out of focus, so the last 30cm has to be done quickly to avoid drifting sideways if there is a side wind and then toppling over due to the sideways movement, if you do slow it with the throttle then be careful if there is any wind.

I always manually land as I don't care for the hard landings that it does when self landing. I Just make sure to use only left stick down to kill motors. Never both (CSC) as this can easily tip the bird over.

You can also cancel RTH when you can see the bird descending and then land it manually!

With the new firmware with the new Precision Landing, my P4 lands gently now and right on target. I'm really happy with this change, As for the rest of the update, I'll test more in the next days along with everyone else...  Since we did get this update, hopefully any bug fixes will come out fairly soon, I hope.