You still having issue's with it huh, Pop ins well that's one i have to get still. On my second play though on hard been fun but needed a break from it too. Whats really pissed me off about the game is that you cannot have more than 1 save which is total bullshit.
I think you're confusing extraordinarily bad pop-ins with ones that are slightly irritating. It's only really noticeable when flying the buzzer and you see trees in the distance pop-in here and there. It's not as smooth a transition as it could be. Far Cry 3 had it too. Unity's known for some below par pop-ins as well. Ubi isn't that good at technical polish of their engines.
The stutter is far worse than any of it.
Agree totally on saves, and that's one of the main things we've been requesting get fixed on the official forum. My workaround has been to start a mission, then quit game before embarking on it. Last time I tried it I found out certain things don't qualify as progress saving events though, like races.
I'd done the mission where you burn the poppy fields, then launched a Kyrati racing event and quit before doing the race. When I started the game up it loaded me at the checkpoint where I'd just gotten to the poppy fields. I can't tell you how many times stuff like that has happened, and often times I have to redo other things as well, like re-purchase skills, etc.
What I propose they do is make manual saves actually log all your progress up to the point you make one, then have it so you can manually load that save separately from the auto save. What's weird is the manual save works fairly well for putting you back in the area you were if for example you save just as you get to the edge of an outpost, and you make a mistake and get detected, then just quit and reload. Yet if you manual save before quitting if at a liberated outpost, it will revert you to some earlier auto save when you start the game back up. It could be that manual saving only works as long as you don't completely exit the game. Any way you cut it it's a crap save system though.
I've not tried patch 1.6 yet, still waiting for more feedback. One person when I said that about patch 1.5 ridiculed me for wasting people's time on a thread discussing the patch, but when I finally DID try it, I reverted right back to a backup copy I had of 1.3, because as many were saying the mem leak in 1.5 is horrible.
I left off in my last session having done pretty much everything I could up to the first Y mission. I was messing around in the Hurk Monkey Statue mission preparing to do a speed run video. It's going well so far, I've only play tested to see how I want to play each checkpoint segment.
Then I heard about 1.6 and decided to wait to capture it, because maybe I can get smoother video on that patch.