So... I'm curious... why did you even get into drones in the first place, then, JimDE??
I mean... think about it. You're putting a 3 pound piece of hardware and electronics into the air. Common sense says something can go wrong (look at all your other hardware and electronics and how often they have issues... how often does your computer crash, or even your phone not work right?).
And you have to have understood that "something going wrong" would mean a drone would have nowhere to go but down. There's not an invisible hand holding the thing up.
RC planes and helicopters have been crashing for decades. Some of them much heavier than the Phantom. And issues are not unique to the Phantom or to DJI. Every drone on the market can experience problems in the sky. Even the big military drones come down sometimes. Hell, even commercial airliners crash occasionally (and just think about all the redundancy built into THOSE things!). The problem is intrinsic in the fact that a drone is up in the air... and we all learned in preschool that "what goes up must come down".
It's a risk you take when you fly ANYTHING. You mitigate it as best you can, by flying in areas where a crash WON'T result in "significant human or property damage", by keeping your bird well-maintained, by doing adequate pre-flight checks, and by waiting for all the systems to signal ready before taking off.
Will that completely eliminate the possibility of any problems occurring?? Of course not. But it can greatly reduce the risk. Which is all you can hope to do.
And OF COURSE you log on to the board and see posts about fly-aways. Because a forum like this is where people come and post when they have PROBLEMS. But NOT accounted for in feed for the month you've been gone are the 100's of thousands of Phantom flights that experienced no problems at all... because who's going to post here about those?
Like I said, these issues are not unique to DJI. You go to forums for ANY drone (or really ANY RC product) and you'll see the same thing.
So maybe RC cars are your thing. They will still experience system failures and TX communication issues... and they'll even experience the occasional "run-away"... but at least when they have problems, they don't have far to fall.