This is just my personal preference, but I believe the naive implementation is miles ahead of the improved ones. The improved version needs at least two movements to go to the other side of the world, doesn't follow the rotation if the cursor is too fast and worse than all, performs a gamma rotation for each non-equatorial point of the sphere. Since we have two degrees of freedom on the screen, I expect to use them t…
Another nice attribute the naive implementation has is path independence. If I grab part of the globe and release it somewhere else I expect those two coordinates to determine the transform. With the non-naive implementation I can get completely different results depending on how I wiggle my mouse on the way. It's true that this gives me more flexibility, but I don't know... it just doesn't feel right to me. Google Earth does it that way too, and it has always bothered me. If I move more than a few degrees on the map I find myself either wildly gyrating my mouse to try to get back into a recognizable north-up orientation or simply clicking the compass rose to have it set things right automatically.