Yeah, while scaffolding resolves the lost reach flight provides, flights real appeal is the ability to asses what you have done to see whether it looks cool as a whole. You can kind of do it with scaffolds but that requires you to treck back 50 blocks and then to build an equally tall scaffold tower. You'd have to do this for every angle you want to look from too.
That's way too cumbersome, whacking on a jetpack and giving the build a circle is much more convenient.
You could make the drone like EIO, too bad we don't have spectator mode code in 1.7.
I would actually like to see a scissor lift in MC though.