Quests compasses aren't something that's ever bothered me at all. My knee-jerk reaction on these is always that you can just not set your quest as active, and you won't get one on your compass - but I do understand that's not really the issue people have with it. I understand that for most who dislike the mechanic, they just want more of the "here's some clues to this place, now find it" sort of quests.
I can kind of grok that, but I think it makes sense for that to be limited, for the most part. I don't need cryptic directions to get to a known city or landmark, for instance. "Here, let me mark that on your map" just makes more sense to me, if I'm getting directions to a place where is makes sense in-game that everyone would know where it is. If I have to hunt down a lone hermit who is the only surviving person who knows the location of a long-lost tomb - sure, make him half-mad as he gives me cryptic clues to a place he barely remembers anymore and have me search far and wide to find it.
But there's no reason we can't have both, anyway. You can certainly have some "find it" quests where you have to go based on someone's directions and following hints and landmarks. Let's not forget Fallout 3 actually had some side quests like that - there were a number of those radio stations where you had to find the broadcast point based on the signal's strength (which I thought was a pretty inventive new little gimmick for a bit of a change-up, actually.) And there were some other unmarked quests where you had to piece together clues to find out the location of a hidden cache.
I don't think anyone really missed out on anything from not having to find verbal directions to something like Rivet City, though - where most people in the Wastes probably have at least a rough idea of where it is, and is something anyone who knew the place would be able to point it out on a map (or your Pip-Boy.)
As far as the actual Perk goes - we'll have to see what it actually does, I suppose. I actually like having a lot of notifiers on my hud about places around me - helps me make decisions about whether I want to go off-trail or keep going to my original destination. There's tons of information that my character ought to have access to that I won't as a player. I don't mind abstracting a lot of that and just placing the end-result in my HUD in a non-intrusive manner.
Sounds like the Perk is just going to highlight a route for you. For me, that may come in handy at times when I'm getting turned around in a dungeon or something. But at the same time, I feel it was be almost more useful to have a Perk with the opposite effect. When I'm exploring in a Vault it can be easy to get turned around, or not remember if I'd taken a certain path or not. I usually want to make sure I've spotted all the "important" stuff before I move on in a dungeon, and there have been cases where I'd thought I'd cleared a place only to find out I'd totally missed it (like the first time I did Dunwich, actually.)
So I think it'd be interesting (kind of late to ask for this now, I suppose) to have a Perk that would tell you which areas in a dungeon have already been explored. Rather than highlighting a path to your next objective, I'd like to see something that shows you the corridors you haven't already been down.