I would love for somebody with more knowledge to weigh in on this. We did point to point tickets and it was waaaay cheaper than a Eurail pass. We’re planning to do point to point ticket next trip as well.
The Eurail passes have changed over the years, but generally they are the best value if you are doing a number of trips within the period covered by the pass. If you are doing a single trip or just a couple of trips, especially if they are fairly short or involve more than one country, the passes are less of a deal. IME, with a sale price on the regular tickets, they can sometimes be better than the Eurail pass.
The longer the trips and the more trips within the period of the pass, the better the deal. These new, simplified passes make it easier to figure that out. They more closely resemble the original Eurail and BritRail passes. When I backpacked around Europe after university in 1972, I had a 15-day BritRail pass for the month I was to spend in the UK and a 2-month Student Eurail pass for the time I spent on the continent. Both of them turned out to be fabulous deals.
I had the BritRail pass paid for by the time I reached Edinburgh (travelling up the east coast with several stops) from London. I travelled to Glasgow, down through the lakes district to Wales and Bath and several stops en route and then back across to London with many additional stops. I used the Eurail pass to travel from Paris through north-east France, Belgium, The Netherlands, northern West Germany, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. It was paid for by the time I left Stockholm to head down through Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, southern France and Spain and back to Paris.
On several occasions it saved me the cost of a hotel room, as we travelled on an overnight train. It also covered certain ferries or buses in areas not served by a train. But that was a LOT of train travel in three months. I was often changing locations every day, seldom staying more than three nights in any one place. But it highlights the point that if you plan to do a lot of train travel, the passes do work.