My experience using the Fusion 360 has been okay. Not perfect, but okay.
It’s only completely lost its GPS once (presumably due to overheating as the weather was exceptionally hot). It’s messed up on an image or two in an otherwise good sequence now and then, but the uploader usually catches those shots and rejects them. If not, they become obvious once the map is displayed, and I can manually delete them.
I haven’t had any problems with the time. Perhaps it synchronizes itself to the computer or the GPS. I really haven’t researched that. But the time hasn’t been off since I set it up.
The overheating is the biggest pain. I didn’t even bother trying to map the past few days because it’s just been too blasted hot. But that’s not completely a bad thing because hot days are usually hazy.
The other big annoyance is the slow transfer speed from the camera, along with the camera’s tendency to break sequences into folders mid-stream, which causes Fusion Studio to vomit. Both problems are solved by copying the SD cards to the computer using a car reader, and processing each folder pair individually. It’s no big deal, but it’s annoying that it’s necessary.
As for getting too much of the car in the raster, I’m not sure that would be any different regardless of the camera. Spherical is spherical. I designed the mount you linked, by the way, and I found I actually had to shorten it a bit from the pictures in the thread. Most of the roads I map have overhanging branches.
But again, I don’t think that’s a camera-specific problem. On a spherical image, you’re going to get the car in the picture; and if you have something mounted on a mast on top of the roof, it’s going to hit low-hanging things.
If I’d paid full-price for the camera, I probably would be more annoyed with its shortcomings, quirks, and needs for workarounds. But I paid about half-retail. Maybe less. I forget exactly. So given that this is basically a hobby for me that happens to benefit the public, I’m satisfied enough that I didn’t return it for a refund.
But yeah, it does have some annoying shortcomings. If I were making a living doing this, I would have returned it already.