Presenting no arguments other than your personal dislike and a handwavey “the module makes too many assumptions about the way content categorization should function”, you dismiss and declare dead one of the historical great strengths of Drupal, namely an industrial-strength taxonomy system, and then proceed to present a list of inefficient workarounds for its use. Creating nodes for all tags on a site? Really?

That you can't think of good use cases does not imply that they do not exist. And if you find overriding taxonomy/term/% with Views, Panels or a custom module hard, I worry about your Drupal proficiency.