Freehand implant placement is not inaccurate in the hands of someone who has done it for twenty years. The argument for guided surgery is a different one, and it gets made badly most of the time.
The real change is the order of operations. Planning in a scan means the finished crown is designed first, and the implant is placed in whatever position that crown requires. Freehand reverses this: the implant goes where the bone is most convenient, and the crown is then designed around wherever it ended up.
Why the order matters
A crown built around a compromised implant position is a compromised crown — usually in emergence profile, sometimes in how easy it is to clean, occasionally in how it looks from the side. None of these are visible on the day. All of them matter at year ten.
The scan also removes the surprises: bone volume and nerve position are known before the first incision rather than discovered during it.
What it does not change
Guided surgery does not make a difficult case easy, and it does not substitute for judgement about whether an implant is the right answer at all. It makes a well-judged plan reliably executable. That is all, and it is enough.