It's like so many other things. The wizard will take you a long way. It may even save your "life" (note the quotes) a time or two. But, like other wizards, You are left at the mercy of the wizard. Your plans are only as good as the folks that wrote the wizard.

I needed to change a bunch of widths on VARCHAR columns recently. I thought "SSMS will let me make the change using the GUI to my development box and I can save the script to do the production change." Hmm. The resulting script made a new table, did an update to copy the data, dropped the old table, and then did a rename. HOLD ON! There are millions of rows in these tables and multiple production servers. This will take hours PER SERVER to run for each table. I have to have the disk space for two copies of my largest table. That update is a logged activity and the whole thing is wrapped in a transaction. Oh, my aching log space! :w00t: ALTER TABLE ALTER COLUMN to the rescue. Takes around a second per table and does not touch existing data at all. Sweet.

As to maintenance plans: Sure that wizard can automate your backups and even have the file named for the date and time. What happens when you run out of disk space? You know that you will. How does it alert when if fails? You are watching your backups, right? Even the ones your custom scripts pump out. Especially those!

Take another lesson from central heating. It was cold in the house so my other half turned up the thermostat. Still cold. Cranked it up again. And again. Still again. Finally I hear this voice. "How's come I can't turn this up further?" What the ...? Sure enough it was against the stop. The pilot light was out and the furnace was not coming on at all.

Our congregation has a computer controlled heating and cooling system with micro-zones and a double fail safe controller. Very effective and very efficient. Still we were getting complaints that some of the rooms were too hot while the one across the hall was too cold. The sensors showed that they were within one half a degree F of each other. We went to the DIY store an bought a bunch of cheap thermostats. One in each room and several in the large gathering rooms. They are not hooked to anything at all, but no more complaints. (And you thought that this weird stuff only happens to Phil Factor.)

So would I recommend the wizard to an intermediate DBA? Sure, but with the "Dutch Uncle" advice that you watch what is does cuz' it's still your private parts on the block when things go wrong.