Maintenance plans are great for those who can't customize something better.

I prefer scripts, because they can be customized to your specific DR needs. For example, I've set up scripts that would check the current LSNs vs the last ones backed up, and customize which databases to back up based on that. Easy enough to do, and quite useful on databases that get only very infrequent data changes. Also easy enough to check available disk space vs database size before attempting a backup, and thus avoid crashing an overloaded disk. That kind of thing.

Since scripts can run CLR (in SQL 2005 and later), which has very robust disk interaction and system interaction capabilities, there are very few limits on what scripts can do.