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Its not the tone/CTSS creating the potential issues you mention, it's stupid people that are too lazy to invest 3 minutes of their life to read the directions and learn/understand how their equipment works that are the problem..

LMRS will never go away... ever. As good as trunked networks, WebEOC and FirstNet are, they will never be reliable because they are all reliant on a single massive infrastructure to exist and be configured correctly to work. Anyone who has ever worked a true SHTF mass casualty, mass municipality response, knows that NONE of those networks work in the affected area. LMRS only requires that an EMP or Nuke hasn't gone off near unprotected radios, and you're moving voice, video and data around the world.

I use tone (DPL actually) so that I DO NOT hear anyone else sharing the same frequency. I don't want to hear the annoying chatter from everyone else at the lake, I only want to hear when MY family members call. THAT is what tone squelch is for. LOTS of people can share the same channel without me having to listen to everyone. Your argument of "what if I have an emergency and need help"...well, this may sound harsh, but your emergency is NOT MY PROBLEM, and I don't care. FRS/GMRS is not designed for emergency comms, but may be use as such by organized groups.

Tones benefits all of us. There are so many stations on 1 frequency you will hear every stations on the same frequency without the tones and you talk about interference

Actually, the tones are not preprogrammed. Out of the box, all the channels are set to use carrier squelch. You have to make the decision to use a code, selecting it from a menu. I don't see the issue here. I would not want to buy a radio with fewer options. Out of the box, without reading any directions, basically anyone can turn on a pair of radios, hand one to someone, and use them to communicate.

The purpose of Digital Private Line (DPL Tone) is so many "user groups" can share the same channel without causing harmful interference to each other. The technology is extremely proficient at its intended purpose. The radio still receives a signal from a radio that doesn't have a matching sub-tone. The radio just discriminates between received signals and only opens the squelch when your selected code is detected. You can literally have 280 groups on one channel, all having different conversations, and not interfering with each other. Go to a major public event (like a Boy Scout Jamboree) and suddenly, 22 channels is no where near enough. Enter DPL on a modern FRS/GMRS combo radio and now you have the ability to have the equivalent of 6,160 channels. Even at a major event, the likelihood of interference due to things like splash, inter-modulation, etc, is almost zero. Especially when you are only using 0.5 watts of power. I see your point, I just disagree. "Familiar" and "intuitive" are words used to describe ease of ability to naturally understand how something works. That understanding ONLY comes with experience and repetition. No one is born familiar with anything and no one is born "intuitively" knowing how to do anything but suck and poop. Everything else is a learn skill. I already answered that question above (my first 2 paragraphs in this post) How you handle any harmful interference you may cause is up to you. If you don't want to use DPL.... don't use DPL. By no means is the feature "ruining" the radio service. It is extremely beneficial to the radio community and has been for 70 years.

What a large majority of people buying blister pack radios think is that having a two-way with them when they go out into the wilds is the radio WILL allow them to contact someone in the case of emergency. We more knowledgeable users know it just ain't so. I doubt there are very many active REACT groups for 27 MHz CB anymore either. Forty years ago back in the '70s CB was a fad and there were a lot of people that took it seriously but the fad died long with the skip and CB devolved into something long haul truckers used to combat loneliness along with the pimps and prostitutes hanging around truck stops. The language heard could best be described as filth that would put a drill sergeant or sailor to shame that the people that would have stopped or provided assistance all went away. Cell phones replaced CBs along with a sense of being connected to others around you as you drove around. Some Ham operators do provide a critical service in connecting people in a disaster situation but, for the most part you never hear about the service. LMR, Land Mobile Radio is dying. Fewer new voices are being heard and many of the most stalwart proponents are passing on and their keys are going silent. Saying all that, I don't believe LMR in all its forms will ever truly die but it will become more and more a niche industry and hobby. The largest user group of two-way radio are those in public safety followed closely by business and industrial users. Public safety agencies are migrating to a cellular system called FirstNet in the 700 MHz range. Once the key issue of mission-critical voice is resolved you will see their VHF and UHF systems dismantled and the trunked 800 MHz voice systems repurposed to a network similar to FirstNet. As both the 700 and 800 MHz systems are close in their propagation characteristics one could be used to handle the voice traffic and the other the data functions from the same transmission sites all tied together with fiber and computers. This shift will further move people from dedicated voice only devices just as we are seeing the shift from simple flip phones to smart devices capable of doing many different functions with varying degrees of success. But that's just my take on where radio is going.

Most of them use FRS Channel 1 Tone 1 and believe they are on a completely "private" channel.