Why is course creation absolutely awful?

I REALLY struggled creating routes for my Philmont hikes last month.  Finally after hours and hours and hours of dragging and dropping and undoing and redoing and forcing the course creation maps to actually go along a visible trail on the map, I got my routes built and they worked relatively well.

Now, I'm going hiking again, and again, it is absolutely impossible to build a course over clearly marked trails from the Garmin Connect web app.  I don't understand why this experience has to be so hard.  This is also a trail that is clearly marked in All Trails, but I don't want to pay for All Trails.  I should be able to use the Garmin maps the way they are.

Why can't this experience get any better?

  • Pretty sure I've figured it out.  Rather than enhancing the interface to build my own courses or use someone elses, Garmin wants me to pay for Garmin Connect+ to use Garmin Trails where I can see the exact route I am trying to build a course for.  Everything has a paywall these days.

  • I'm not sure where your problem lies. I use Connect on the web to build my walking, running and cycling trails. Any problems I have usually relate to a lack of underlying trail data, in which case I'll sometimes use the Freehand option between a couple of points to fix that short section.