so ive been using litchi for probably two years now and its fine but lately its been feeling kinda stale, the interface hasnt really changed and some of the waypoint interpolation stuff drives me nuts when you're trying to do curved paths on a grid mission. someone on another thread mentioned dronelink and i downloaded the trial but havent really dug into it yet.

main thing i care about is photogrammetry missions, usually flying a mini 3 pro and sometimes borrowing a friend's m30t for bigger jobs. does dronelink actually handle terrain following better or is that still kind of hit or miss depending on your DEM quality. also curious if anyone has tried running missions from dronelink on the RC controller without a phone tethered, saw something about that in the docs but wasnt sure if it actually works reliably in the field

dronelink is genuinely better for complex waypoint stuff imo, the terrain following actually works well if you feed it a decent elevation model, ive used it with SRTM data and it was close enough for most survey work. the RC controller integration is a bit finicky though, had it drop the mission connection once mid-flight which was not fun. keep a phone as backup just in case

litchi still wins for simplicity if you just want a quick orbit or focus track, but for actual planned missions dronelink has more knobs to turn

i switched from litchi to dronelink about 6 months ago and honestly the learning curve is steeper than i expected but its worth it. the mission planning interface on desktop is way more powerful. terrain following is solid but yeah you're only as good as your elevation data, i ran into issues in some hilly areas where the SRTM was off by like 8-10 meters and that gets a little nervewracking

one thing nobody mentions is the dronelink community hub where people share mission templates, saved me a ton of time for standard grid surveys