Cracks appearing in flickr's geotagging community?

It seems that I'm not the only one who has lost interest in the once vibrant and innovative geotagging group on flickr. Threads about (lack of) accuracy, inability to position a map (and get photos), in fact to summarize the new map format is a disaster, now are starting to out number the nifty new things to do. The problems probably relate mainly to a new "feature" in flickr called places. It boldly promises -

The Places project is our way of saying thank you to all our members who’ve taken the time to put their gorgeous photos on a map.

The trouble being they will no longer be your photos, and finding your photos is, well so hard, I gave up.
My biggest whinge about geotagging via flickr, is however to do with the Yahoo Maps engine behind it, it just is not good enough for most of the parts of Australia (ie outside the main cities) that I like to photograph. The "We're sorry the data you requested..." mosaic means I can not accurately geotagged via flickr end of story. What I use instead is picassa's link to google earth, maybe not as easy to do but it works and with care it can be accurate to a few meters (ie close to many popular portable GPS units