Personally, I use scripting as often as possible, for several reasons. One is that it gives me total control over the process and two, I do it so I know what is going on "under the hood".

Dashboards impress me. Give me tools that can reveal a lot of interconnected information about performance. That's the kind of tool that I can do with scripts but is harder to implement.

A simple search tool doesn't do it for me. If a tool has a single function I can usually do it quicker with a script.