I.Scouting useless?
I know that you can scout the nodes around you but it cost MovementPoints, Resourcefullness and maybe scouts itself to get a chance to get basic informations for one node...compared to the cost in travel time and therefore supplies i found it useless for 95% of the time. It's nice to have some scouts for hunting and events but i don't find scouting itself usefull? Do i miss something?

II.Companions and Loyality
Aside from gifts and their story i have no idea that makes companions. gifted the Orcgladiator some times and got him to the first loyaliylevel..travel some days to the next city..no events, quests or fights and then i notice he's back to normal?
Is there any way to see what the companions likes and dislikes aside from the mostly cryptic hints from talking with them (Aside from the dwarven smuggler...he's pretty clear about his principles..money rules :)

I also agree that Scouts are quite useless. With my playing style, they don't pay off in any way - upkeep costs, crowded camp and things like that render them an annoyance only. The small benefits here and there don't compensate for that.

According the companions, their main role nowadays is taking over a deputy. In earlier times it was possible to level them up, something now is disabled to force you into doing loyality quests. You may consider to only enhance skills that help with hunting and foraging if you make use of those, or engeneering and things like that for some bonuses. For figthing they are quite useless without proper equipment and until at least level 3 with the Empower perk and 12 points of ressourcefulness, otherwise level 5.

I would recommend to start with Renkailon as Scout Master (+1 movement every day) and Gerrik as Supercargo (+15% cargo capacity). You will inevitably stumble across Finndurarth at some time, take her to Kernak fast (otherwise she will permanentely leave) and make her Spellweaver to use a Heat Shielding Crystal if it comes handy.
The other deputies I consider more or less nice-to-have but not essential.

The loyality quests better wait until the comitatus has the necessary offensive and defensive stats - at which time, on the other hand, the abilities of the companions are of low additional value for the comitatus. I'm afraid that they had been much better before the loyality quests divested them of their usefulness.

Compamions:
I found 8 companions until now and overall i found them very usefull.
I.If you level them up they gain (insight used)X3 as skillpoints so leveling them all to 3 can give you comtitatus quite a number of usefull skills.
II.you can always use "cull the ranks" for free to kill some enemies and lower the enemy moral, there quite strong used this way compared to their stratgic combat value.

Scouts:
I tried a full hunting setup for travel to citys without roadconnection...with skills+items+Venatoris+falcon, hunting dogs,...with 10 scouts i get 0-240 Supplies with 2% ciritcal fail,25 fail, 53%Success,20 cirt sucess in theory but after 100 hunts i had 15 crit fails, 48 fails, 25 success and 12crits and half of the successfull hunts only got 50-80 supplies.
Without save/reload, just leaving the scouts at home and travel at full speed might be better but mabye i was just very unlucky. Another point is, falcon, dogs, venatoris and a few other things(Is hunting affected by the odd Job bonus?) say the give a higher basic chance, i didn't notice any big difference.
For combat i am still unsure about scouts, there cheap to hire and get less then warriors, their combatoptions are nice because they don't use vigor but they die fast if targetet and for their low combatvalue the consume much.

Insight
Gaining insight is my major problem, the bountys i did gave me 1-2 max, sidequests no-2, Companionquests 1-5 and major Quests 1-5 per stage aside from the insight from random "rainy Day" and the rare"Prayer insight" i found no source that give repeatablt insight.