I will agree........
That some eyewitness accounts are highly embellished by their imaginations and the wish for recognition. I can mention a few cases that make me groan. I can think of a several who embellished their cases, wrote and sold many books and completely fooled a lot of investigators.
I have walked out of their lectures in defiance, often coughing loudly for several minutes before making my exit.
However your wish, for everyone to parlay their experience into compass degrees and mariner directions shows your own personal bias. Farmers may have a problem with this, but certainly pilots and astronauts did not.