As a player, I hate the losing the tracker as well. But as a developer the change make a lot of sense.

The tracker was removed on purpose to prevent lawsuits by having people trespass. If you saw a dragonite of massive CP just over the fence of a no trespassing private property — how many people would jump the fence? The answer is — A lot. And the company might be liable.

The tracker feature is definitely painful to lose as it made a LOT of people happy and made the game dramatically more sociable. The company simply decided the potential lawsuits and danger to peoples lives was more important. Imagine there is a Snorlax with massive CP and your child is climbing a fence to get into an electrical substation area where they could die quite easily. I am pretty sure they killed the tracker for that reason and this made it impossible to ‘pinpoint’ a pokemons true location. Plus it jives with the original intent of the game to have Pokemon ‘random’ so it was probably not that hard of a decision them to make despite all of our outcries.

One day some developer will figure out a way to make this feature safe and then we will have it. Like make just confirmed safe locations trackable. That would be the first step but it’s going to take time. I suspect another company would have a ‘massive advantage’ if they figured this out before Niantic.

As a small game maker that leaves me out of that gold hunt unfortunately.