You're right, that system is quite convoluted, but I guess not uncommon for these older games.
To be honest I was a little sad that ERAS doesn't have real direct sail, it's more or less the same thing as in GOF 1.0, the only difference is that it auto-cycles your location in very much the same way a world map cycle would. The most disappointing aspect of that is it doesn't fully retain weather conditions when it does cycle/sync, which I thought would be the main point of it. So mechanically you could say the only real difference is that it just saves you from cycling the map manually. It does seem to do a better job of syncing your orientation relative to other entities. At least you don't get rubberbanded back half the distance you travelled like in GOF 1.0 lol.