Took my comment a little too much to heart, I'm just saying that gamers coming from earlier games got frustrated for a lot of reasons.
Aye my bad -- I used to get so tired of the realism vs. jetpacks dichotomy in reference to GTAIV and previous GTA's
I know exactly the corner and u-turn you are talking about. My point is, what if Rockstar didn't intend for you to just drive whenever/wherever in traffic?
What if they purposely wanted these bottlenecks at times so you couldn't just ride into oncoming or go onto the grass but had to wait behind cops or traffic while at the toll booth?
Things like this weren't possible in the earlier games. My point with jetpacks and fantasy was about the unrealistic nature of travel in earlier games. And a lot of fans used to it weren't happy with two lane roads covered with traffic and lights and cop cars etc.
If Rockstar intended that corner in Bohan, then they missed a major usability issue that added a lot of tedium to that area. And if they wanted to add tedium, then that's bad game design. I don't think that all areas should be able to be cruised through, but that corner is not realistic, there are no highways in New York between metropolitan areas that end like that, there are almost none in the world, because it just doesn't exist. That's not driving wherever or whenever -- which is fine when you're in downtown manhattan (there's that other corner near the China town arcades on the fringe of the financial district in Manhattan where it's a high traffic left hand turn which results in an accident 90% of the time... But at least in that case, it makes sense, you're in downtown manhattan) -- but this is a region that is very poorly designed, enough so that the AI cars can't even navigate it... They get caught on themselves and pile-up, and the high percentage of police cars in that area make for a tedious drive through every time.
If it was unintentional to design that, then it's just sloppy. If they intentionally made an unrealistic intersection at a high traffic zone (that also happens to have zero immersion relevance, unlike something like Manhattan), so that the gamer is supposed to feel annoyed by it every time they drive through it, then it's terrible game design.
I don't think that not wanting that turn -- which was poorly designed eithr intentionally or unintentionally -- means that you want "unrealistic travel." That area (and other areas like it in the game) don't exist anywhere in real New York, or anywhere in the world. Not wanting that is not the same as wanting jetpacks and fighter jets.
(FWIW, there are dozens of other corners like this in the game, or areas where the road dips down and causes the car physics [which I like on the whole] to unrealistically lose control, but this is probably the most stated, highly traveled area for the player with that result).