Personally I find the perceived changes to auto follow to be complete suckage. Now while on auto follow I cannot use my turn keys to move the follower in a small, smooth circle around the leader. Instead they just spin on the spot. If I use the strafe keys, the follower toon has to move in a wide orbit around the leader just to make a minor position change.
Yes - totally and utterly - I move my followers in exactly the same way you described and it's now an utter pain to get them into position (use a lot of rogues) - it only seems to work now whilst in combat

Another thing which doesn't seem to work very well lately - tabbing to target next npc - the way it used to work was closest to furtherest - now, it's more line of sight - which leads me often to sending the groups pets charging off to attack mobs which aren't in the current encounter leading to all sorts of mass AOEing to calm things down - real pain in the @ss