My very limited understanding of the REM Autofit feature inside of Genie 2 is designed to work with an approved/compatible third party REM equipment to automatically match the prescribed gain curve to the target curve without needing the HCP to manually intervene and do this matching.
So I wouldn’t call it a poor fit compared to an external REM. With an external REM, the HCP usually matches your gain curve to a standard fitting rationale such as NAL-NL2, and the adjustment has to be made manually. The external REM equipment doesn’t have the proprietary knowledge of the VAC+ fitting rationale, so matching to a standard fitting rationale like NAL-NL2 is the only logical thing to do.
With a REM equipment setup that’s compatible with the Genie 2 REM AutoFit, the HCP doesn’t have to make any manual adjustment to match the target curve, Genie 2’s REM AutoFit will do all this adjustment to target curve automatically for you. Furthermore, I’m not 100% sure of this, but I’m inclined to think that REM AutoFit will automatically adjust to match the target curve that is based on the Oticon proprietary VAC+ fitting rationale, instead of a standard fitting rationale like NAL-NL2. In this sense, if what I surmise here is true, then using REM AutoFit would be not only more fast and efficient, but also more accurate (in terms of VAC+ compatibility) because if you’re adjusting a VAC+ based gain curve, you’d want to match it to a VAC+ based target curve, instead of trying to match it to an NAL-NL2 based target curve.
Having said that, I recall having a conversation with @Neville, where he explained to me that Oticon actually prefers HCPs to do REM on their aids against a standard fitting rationale. I don’t know why, and like I said, I don’t really know much about REM anyway. But @Neville is copied here, so he can chime in and correct anything I said above that’s not true.