Hammer, I too tried DJI's Ground Station (GS) Pro. I decided to wait until DJI removes the waypoint limit and "enhances" the manner in which it runs missions. (Not saying its a bad app or that there won't be a lot of folks whose needs it will easily meet. It just didn't meet mine.)
I've had reasonably good success with DroneDeploy (DD), with a few exceptions. DD claims that they made some upgrades to its site and its app. This is based on the iOS App Store update information and some recent email exchanges with the company that I have yet to test.
My biggest beef has always been DD's failure to support true AGL (i.e. conform AC altitude to changes in ground elevations) which affects both image capture area, overlap, and resolution. The app does, however, perform (for the most part) more reliably than I've experienced with other apps when mapping with a
P4P (for example and most notably, failures with Map Pilot [MP] which I need to reevaluate now that DJI has released new firmware).
I don't use DD's image processing due to the limits that they impose per mission. But, for the most part, I do find that the AC generally always stays on mission; even when when telemetry appears to drop. (In other words, the AC reliably collects and saves images to the AC's SD card and stays on mission even when the app behaves as if telemetry has dropped.)
TL;DR - If it's any consolation, the
P4P's obstacle avoidance actually did kick in for me on one particular mission where I was imaging at 200' relative to my starting point (because relative is all that DD knows how to do). The mission ran a grid east to west into some foothills where there was a possibility that ground elevation might exceed mission altitude. I figured one of three possibilities would occur: (1) the mission would run its course without triggering obstacle avoidance; (2) obstacle avoidance would fail, DD would fly the bird into the side of a hill, and I'd have to go hike across the desert to go hunting for it; or (3) obstacle avoidance would kick in and we'd see what happened next.
DD and the AC chose Option 3. When ground elevation exceed mission elevation the AC just stopped proximate to the hillside, but did not execute a RTH. It just hung out and hovered near the hillside. (Perhaps they were bonding.) So I manually executed a RTH from the controller and re-ran that portion of the mission again at a slightly higher altitude. This underscores why maintaining at least a minimum AGL is important.
The hillside experience raised another deficiency with DD with respect to resuming a mission for any issues other than battery changes. Apparently, DD stored the last successful waypoint, but kept the information to itself. Then the app decided to resume from an entirely illogical waypoint. So if I wanted to complete the remainder of the mission while avoid the problem waypoint(s), determining an alternative waypoint to resume from was counterintuitive and a painful process.
I've got a small project pending and will be running comparative missions in both DD and MP. Between recent firmware releases and purported app fixes I'm hoping to see improvements. If so, I'll report back. Neither DD or MP are the only tools out there, but I like them well enough to try to "encourage" them to up their game.
