i deprecated my oldstyle maintenance plans in favor of TSQL scripts for the same steps. for example, i really liked Gianluca Sartori's version of capturing only relevant errors from DBCC CheckDB that he put together below, because i can run it as a job, but receive an email when something comes up in the results. that way i don't have to check the job for failures.
http://spaghettidba.com/2011/11/28/email-alert-dbcc-checkdb/
Lowell