I've never had needle down, so don't even know what I'm missing. When sewing to a point where I need to stop and turn, I just lay off the pedal slowly, bring my right hand to the fly wheel and as the stitching comes to a stop I manually give it an extra turn to stop with the needle down. After 40 years I can do it without even thinking and wouldn't know what to do if I had a machine that made decisions on its own.