Mapping Shares to Drive Letters: Pros and Cons and Questions

It's easy enough to Google drive mapping and find lists of pros and cons.
In our situation, using DFSR, we were advised to map drive letters to the shares by GPO.
This  is working.
One advantage I see to mapping the shares to drive letters is that the users should have an easier time finding them and referring to them
AND:
If we want to change the underlying sharenames, we can replace the GPO that points shares to drive letters.
(I realize that using DFSR, this is already a capability).
But, we have some reasons for not addressing through the DFSR namespaces.

This raises the question:
Using a GPO, can drive mapping be avoided by using some other method in a GPO?
I don't see how - so I suspect the answer is "no".
For example, if one can set up addressing "N:\" then is there another way?  
I don't think I care whether UNC is used or not.  I've found very few cases where drive letters were solely required for addressing.