I guess the trouble with assessing autofocus reliability is that unless you go to some serious lengths to collect statistics, it’s quite hard to really know if it’s become better or worse… @JohemianKnapsody has been working on improving the fast autofocus (especially if you want to acquire a Z stack) but that will take a little while to make it into a beta release, and is currently only tuned for using a 100x lens.
Setting the number of Z steps to 1 will disable Z stacking, but should have no effect on the autofocus routine. If the number of Z steps is 1, the Z step size is ignored.
You’re right, it would be good to document the scan paths somewhere. Again, @JohemianKnapsody did a nice job of visualising scans, so we should figure out how to integrate that into the GUI in a future release. In the meantime, we really ought to start some sort of software manual…