[SM] It's the wonder of satellite technology. Effectively the whole country has been remapped (at least as far as contours are concerned) in a matter of a couple of years whereas before there was a large team of cartographers doing physical surveys. This has got rid of some of the more obvious mistakes that used to exist, although there are still paths shown going over cliff edges in a couple of places that I know. For orienteering we normally start with a base plot (usually from the OS) with contour intervals down to 2.5 metres where appropriate (5m for very steep ground). There is then a specialised package (OCAD - there were others but this has come out on top) which has all the correct colours and symbols built in and you can build the map from that. There is still a need for fieldwork, but the whole thing is much slicker and maps get changed up to about 2 weeks before an event. Also with cheap high-quality printing most events now have the courses pre-printed - no need to copy from a master, and you can even run off more copies while the event is taking place if you get more than expected on one course. With electronic punching you get a print-out of your final and split times as soon as you finish and results from an event are on the web the same day. Up to about 10 years ago you left an SAE at the event and got the results about 1-2 weeks later.
For mountain walking I like Harvey Maps. They are at 1:40000, often photo-enlarged to 1:25000. They aren't as good in farmland as they don't show field boundaries, but they do show what is actually on the ground - there are different symbols for a right of way which is visible and one which is not visible as well as another for a visible path which is not a r.o.w.. They also change the colour of the contours to show rocky or marshy ground.
This weekend I will continue recovering. I like maps but do not own many (only one proper map, really), mainly because we don't have much landscape over here. Or perhaps we have far too much of it. In any case, [INJ] I feel remarkably uneasy when I am in an unfamiliar place without a map, and I really need to know where North is. Changing hemispheres is very disturbing. I came very close to mapping our parts of Oman, at least as far as roads and such things go, because they (maps) either did not exist or were wildly inaccurate. But the cost of GPSrs was too high. I now have a nifty little one, and have been enjoying the occasional geocache, thanks to my sister and brother-in-law's introduction. It definitely helps break up long drives, and is a fun way to explore new places. I haven't done orienteering in at least 20 years.
[ImNotJohn] For years I lived in a street that the local "A-Z" type guide showed as having a cross street where there wasn't so much as a kerbstone. When this error survived two reprintings I got clued in. By pure chance I was living next door to a copyright protection scheme. The map publisher had put in a fake street so that they could easily catch competitors who saved the cost of a survey just by copying their maps. I've learned since then that an awful lot of this sort of thing goes on. Dictionaries, thesauri (?) and encyclopediae (??) have fake entries in them to snare copyright infringers. The original pubishers work on the theory that you'd be unlikely to actually read the articles/entries since you can't get to them in any day-to-day use of the dictionary/thesarus/encyclopedia but only by reading through them serially.
I have to admit, sending someone off a cliff seems a bit much though. I hope this gets fixed in GPS sets since judging from recent news items some GPSers are a bit too slavish when it comes to following the directions their boxes give them and I wouldn't be surprised to read of someone stepping out into empty space.
I have a couple of 1:25000 maps covering my area of residence. A month or so ago I dug out one of them in order to scan part of it and send the resultant image to a cyber-acquaintance. I doubt that I had referred to this publication within the last three or four years. I also forgot to put it back in stowage that evening. The following afternoon my wife came home and plonked down before me a new copy of the very same map. Having given her a puzzled look she explained that the previous evening she had looked for the 'missing' map and, not finding it, thought it best to buy a new one.