Microsoft is making money by showing adverts in your start menu, on your lock screen and in some of their apps. There's settings that you can toggle to hide most of the adverts, but naturally Microsoft doesn't want to make it easy to disable everything. That's why they've removed and limited some of the group policy settings. SoftLandingEnabled = A user specific setting DisableSoftLanding = A global setting So if you're logged into your account you can still disable the settings for yourself, but you can't disable it for everyone via a group policy. If you want to do that then Microsoft would like you to buy the more expensive Enterprise edition.
Ok, I finally got it now, when you said "user settings still remain" you actually meant "per-user settings still remain". So when the winaero, ghacks etc. articles say that Windows Tips cannot be turned off any more in RS1 Home/Pro via Group Policy, they simply mean they cannot be turned off at once for all users. Per-user settings are still very much present and working, both via UI and corresponding reg value. So then that doesn't sound so bad in a home setting to me! Earlier I thought RS1 Home/Pro users couldn't turn tips off at all, but turns out it's just a simple matter of setting the UI option or importing a reg file for every user. Especially when most home PCs I've seen have only one or two users, this change is hardly so terrible. However, disabling the Lock Screen and Turn off Microsoft Consumer Experiences have no UI settings, and seems the group policy/reg values for these two are now Enterprise/Education only. In future too more settings might be restricted in Home/Pro, so sounds like Enterprise is still the version worth installing as of now. Edit: Still confused though why MS chose two separate locations and names in the registry. Couldn't they have made HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ContentDeliveryManager\SoftLandingEnabled (per-user) and HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\ContentDeliveryManager\SoftLandingEnabled (all users)? Isn't that how HKCU and HKLM are supposed to work?
This won't disable the entire lock screen, but you can disable the junk it'll display. Settings > Personalization > Lock screen Select a picture and disable "Get fun facts, tips and more from Windows and Cortana on your lock screen" To answer your question though, it's confusing because Microsoft want it to be. They don't want people to easily disable everything.