I've been back into SWTOR since a few weeks before the F2P launch and I really have been having a good time. My experiences are that /follow works quite well but lag created by visual impediments like the "grass" rendering on Belsavis and Alderaan. I recommend setting the grass setting to 0 and disable AA if your suffering visual stuttering/lag. It totally changed my experience.

With F2P I've been considering adding 2 F2P accounts with my P2P accounts and just purchase a few skill bars for them. Problem is that my PC is too dated to pull this off currently so I will just focus on my main accounts. If you will be doing the normal questing for exp I highly recommend buying all the class mission exp bonus perks for +30%, it really helps and I've managed to skip a lot of side quests especially on Nar Shaddaa.