I had tried (free for now) AutoStitch (www.autostitch.net) on a well controlled 3-frame horizontal panorama and got good results, but it's supposed to be able to make a large mosaic of photos "automatically", figuring out where to place each one, stitching and blending them together into a spherical panorama.
A recent visit to Burg Hohenecken (Kaiserslautern, Deutschland) seemed like the right time to try this because I couldn't move very far from the structure. This was made from 19 quick handheld exposure-locked photos roughly covering the view I was interested in, holding the camera in approximately the same position. I consider this excellent for my purposes. It produced this result very quickly. It's shown here before cropping.
The uncertain future of AutoStitch makes dependence on this software questionable, but for now it's quite nice.