The cost, and setup time to use any of these tools has been far greater than loading up a image and sharing it.
We've found no VTT tool that can do basic fog of war _without_ loading in a bunch of other features we simply don't need.
Is it superior? I never said that, I said that the feature set was overkill.
A long term problem? Like I said above, our game has been going for _4_ years.
A big problem with these tools is the assumption that your players won't do something you didn't plan for. Which the system I described deals with well. Our DM has many times spent hours planning our game only for us to spend the entire time slot in one location, or deciding to go somewhere else. When that happens, all he has to do is roll out the setting for us to use our imaginations, or to load up a new image and black layer and share it, 5 - 10 minutes tops.
I wouldn’t suggest you change, but to suggest this method is in any way superior to actually learning the tools and how they work is ridiculous.
And if a DM can’t spare the hour or so to reach parity with this method, that’s gonna be a long term problem for the table.