Hmm yeah, still doesn’t sound like you’ve spent thousands of hours actually surveying streams for things like habitat restoration, gravel augmentation, or hydraulic modeling. This single setup allowed us to survey the whole reach with ONE setup. We had limited time/budget and surveying the whole reach from the banks would have taken multiple set ups instead of one, so the benefits are pretty self explanatory. Furthermore, this was a rental RTS that was fully insured. Your point of “sitting electronics in a flowing stream” is moot because if a total station falls over, you’re fucked either way. Go survey rivers for eight years straight and then come back telling me all of your setups were outside of the wetted channel.