from even my very recent experience just a week ago biking with some colleagues of my partner, some people just have no sense of direction or judgement of distance or anything.
So lets face it kids, you gotta learn some basic map reading / basic orientation skills in life or you are effed if your battery powered device shepherding you along like some poor blind mustard gassed WW1 soldier stops working.
there, it's official, I'm a grumpy old bastard ;-)
Yeah I find most people can't give good directions to save their life.
I don't know if it was because I was in an artillery unit, where accurate map reading was *kinda* important, or if it's just because I've always had thing for maps, but I'd rather have someone give me the address so I can look it up and figure out the best route. Old people give needlessly complicated and inaccurate directions like "turn left at the red barn and then it'll be the third white house past old Lady Johnson's cow--but the cow died in 1999" and young people don't understand things like "north" and "east" and "go three miles."
Back to the thread though -- I was a little stubborn about using maps and cue sheets for a long time, my reasoning being that cue sheets don't run out of batteries. But in practice there's a lot of things that can wrong, admittedly mostly because of human error. Maybe I'm zoned out and I missed a road sign. Maybe the name of the road sign is one thing on the cue sheet but we're actually in a different county and they named it something different. Maybe the county hasn't maintained the signs and it's missing. Maybe I misread the cue sheet and I'm looking for the next cue. Maybe I screwed up the mileage somehow and now I'm off. I mean, I can get back on track but it's an avoidable hassle.
A few years ago I bought a GPS computer with navigation (wahoo bolt) mainly to more accurately log my mileage and keep track of heart rate, but because it came with navigation I might as well give it a shot. After using it in a long gravel race I was an instant convert, you really can't beat the ease and convenience. I'll still carry maps and cue sheets as a backup but it's a definite quality of life upgrade.