Well for me, it's a necessary evil. It's the method they chose for expansion of the world, and its alternative would be open exploration which is not really an option given the condition of the land after the Fall. It's one of those design copouts that you have to learn to live with, like the cloning facilities to "simulate" the raise dead spell from fantasy games.
There's this one little thing that kind of bothers me: the sectors. It's a system that basically hand guides you along the path, offering new areas with more advanced and higher-level stuff. That's just too artificial to find justification in the game world itself. What do you guys think about the sectors?