It became something of a joke in my group about how they knew where they were supposed to go, which places at their current location there would be something to find, etc. They had a great time on Devil's Elbow trying to skirt around the annotated landmarks, which was both fun and frustrating.
Well, if you have the PDFs, you can usually print them without annotations.
However, it sounds like you've got a group of players who are incapable of not metagaming. Either don't show the maps and say "sorry, can't show you the map, you guys take advantage of it," or move the stuff on the map and if they complain say "oh, sorry ... I didn't tell you ... the map merely shows the rumored location. You actually walked right into it."
I ran a module once and did that; I just drew my own map and relocated everything because I knew some of the players had read it. It confused the heck out of them because they kept trying to use the information they thought they knew and it kept messing them up.
However, it sounds like you've got a group of players who are incapable of not metagaming. Either don't show the maps and say "sorry, can't show you the map, you guys take advantage of it," or move the stuff on the map and if they complain say "oh, sorry ... I didn't tell you ... the map merely shows the rumored location. You actually walked right into it."
Agreed. There's not much on Devil's Elbow, besides the annotated landmarks and lots and lots of dense forest/difficult terrain. I don't really see the point of players who set out to avoid the adventure, but if they wanted to do it, I'd just let them wander the forest aimlessly, never finding anything, and seeing how much fun it actually is if it doesn't make the DM tear his hair out for their own amusement. What PC is going to land on a deserted island, see the obvious landmarks (lighthouse and tower sticking up above the trees and a single road leading through dense forest), and say, "Hey, guys, let's not go there"?
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In all honesty, their avoidance wasn't anything against the story, my GMing or anything like that. It was really done more in defiance of Paizo putting the key locations/plot points on the maps in numerical order, which is why it was both amusing and annoying.
A great reason to NOT use maps in the older folios as player handouts. They were certainly not INTENDED to be used as player handouts the philosophy behind those older folios was that "It would be helpful for the GM to be able to have the map of the dungeon separate from the adventure so he could have it handy at all times behind his GM screen to reference as he flips through the adventure to read and run encounters," combined with a dose of, "These folios serve as 'Maps of Mystery' for GMs who aren't running the associated AP, and they can use the maps as blank dungeons in their own home campaigns to stock with encounters."
The AP map folios have gone through some significant revision since the early days, after it became more and more obvious that the way we envisioned and intended the folios to be used wasn't really syncing up with how folks actually wanted to use them which was as player handouts. And so in the modern map folios, we've switched to providing something we CAN'T provide in the AP poster maps of key regions in the AP, such as cities and regional maps and large handout maps for the GM to use as player handouts.
I was mostly curious if there was a reason why all Pathfinder maps have this. I can understand the GM material having them, but I was a bummed out when I paid almost $20 for the adventure path's mapfolio, which is intended for the players to see, only to find the same curiosity-stomping highlights.
See my above response the reason the maps had all the tags was because they were intended to be GM aids, not player aids. Since then, we've listened to customer feedback and changed how the map folios done, but since we don't have time machines, we can't go back and change the folios we've already published.