Oddly enough, I've found "hybrid" tables that contain an Adjacency List, Hierarchical Path (without the HierarchyID, so far), and Nested Sets to have advantages that no one particular method has. For example and as you've said, it's very easy to move, add, and delete nodes and whole sub-trees in the Adjacency List (a human can easily eye-ball the correct changes, if necessary) but there's some blinding speed and query flexibility to be had with Nested Sets.