It kinda sounds like you just need your cities to have a "VTOL only" policy. No need to worry about complicated flight paths and sudden changes of direction if the aircraft is only going (roughly) straight up or down. Of course, with or without this kind of policy, no sane city planner would put a hovercraft terminal below tree cover such that pedestrians could not see descending hovercraft (or descending hovercraft couldn't see ascending ones) until the last minute. Fortunately, many city planners and city councils in real life are bat shit insane, so it's not exactly an immersion-breaking decision to have that still be an element of your cities.
On the first page of my Subscribed/Hot there are only three posts which are older than a day. One is 9 days old, one is 23 days, and one is 1 month. Everything else is from within the last 24 hours.
Nah, people mostly just found ways to get around it. They've also, from what I've heard, loosened up a bit on the restrictions.
Learning Haskell made me feel like a mega dweeb but it was one of the more fun things I did in college!