@Cam, I currently use a very similar workflow with Litchi and/or Ultimate Flight.
Your flight experience is pretty disheartening, I haven’t tried this version yet but am also flying a P3P with 1.6 firmware. I ordered a Nvidia Shield tablet that should be here tomorrow and hoping to get out this weekend for some test flights.
My feature requests are also very similar to yours, which I posted here https://community.pix4d.com/t/4838?page=5#comments&gsc.tab=0 since the 2.08 forum seemed to be more active than this one.