I'll admit that I haven't looked at the maintenance plan capability in 2005 or 2008 because we just started using those platforms at work. I have seen them in use, and for shops that don't have a reasonably-skilled DBA, they're better than nothing. I think my biggest gripe is if you have them running DBCCs, you don't get reasonable output. I run all of my DBCCs every nightly via OSQL called by a scheduled job, and the full result file is parsed through FIND so that I see only the ERROR lines. If I see non-zero numbers, I can go back to the full output and find the offender and fix it. Otherwise, I glance at maybe 50 lines just to makes sure they're all zero numbers.

I started using this technique back in the v4 days and have no plans on replacing it with maintenance plans.

What I would like to see in maintenance plans is the ability to back up every database NOT on a list so that if a developer or another manager adds one, it'll get backed up. I'm sure there's a script for doing this, I haven't had time to find one and implement it.