These topics were brought up at some point around the start of the beta, but seem to have been totally forgotten. Either that, or people are happy with them now. Or maybe Obsidian promised to fix them, I don't know.
Whatever the case, I wanted to bring them up again since they really bother me. Why can I not put only one of my characters into scouting mode? Why does my whole party have to come with me through every screen transition? I'm sure there are plenty of situations when you'd want to have your entire party sneaking around, and obviously a certain amount of 'gather your party' is acceptable, but come on. There are so many situations where you might want only a single character scouting ahead (like the guy who has the highest stealth skill). Maybe I want my fighter to enter a building first to check for giant spiders. At the moment, if I want to scout, every character has to hunch over, slightly invisible, looking a bit silly, while the rogue (other stealth classes are available) does the actual scouting.
A particularly infuriating case, and a good way to highlight both problems, is when you're at the inn and you want to fetch the hidden staff in the floorboards (because loot). In an IE game, the process would be: select thief, order him/her upstairs, turn on 'scouting mode' (detect traps) and grab the loot. You know, thief stuff. In PoE, I have to select my entire party, shuffle all of them upstairs, make them all go into full stealth ninja mode and then send one of them to pick up the staff. It's clunky, it's silly and it's not how you'd expect to be able to handle your characters.
As far as I can see, there's no narrative or logical reason for your entire party to move with every transition, or for them all to go into scouting mode at the same time (there's a marquee select for a reason). It also wasn't like this in the IE games, and, as far as I can tell, it's not any more fun this way. So it's probably due to time constraints and/or technical limitations. If so, I for one would like them try and fix these issues.