A fairly comprehensive review here by a MacInTouch user of the newest version of Disk Warrior.

It was especially informative to read about the "bootable" flash drive version of DW5.

The "bootable" flash drive sounds useful, but the old fallback of running DW from a bootable volume still seems like the best idea.

As long as you've got a bootable external drive there's never been any need to buy a new disc to boot a new Mac.

Am I missing something?

What you may be missing is the comment about the fact that the new flash drive with DW5 only boots into Tiger, Leopard and Snow Leopard, while users of the subsequent OS X versions need to boot from the Recovery partition on their Macs, and then use Terminal to launch DiskWarrior from the flash drive. If you use FileVault, you have to use Terminal too, even if you can boot from the flash drive.
There is an option to create dedicated boot (flash) drives for specific OSes; hence another comment about the need for more than one bootable drive (of any kind) when you have (to deal with) several Macs running different versions of Mac OS X including those beyond Snow Leopard.

The comments are not incorrect, but the issue is with Mac OS X, and not so much with Alsoft. It also underlies Alsoft's choice to move from CD to flash drive as distribution medium, even though you cannot transparently accommodate every possible configuration with a single medium. There's nothing to stop you from installing DW on a HD, be it internal or external.

Micromat has a similar approach on their ProToGo 4 and comes with several "profiles" that allow it to be used on multiple Macs and ProSoft Engineering's Drive Genius 4 now comes on or can be ported to what they call a "Bootwell" drive. Obviously Mavericks and Yosemite have made utility developers lives more interesting, as in the Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times."

From Alsoft's DiskWarrior 5 System Requirements page:

You're right, of course, with your quote from DW5's SysReqs; that option was what I alluded to in the sentence following the one you quoted from me. However, it doesn't change the Terminal route for those who want to get cracking with DW5 before making their custom boot drive. Also remember that I was referring to posts from others in a MIT Reader Report, as well as Artie's take on them.

The manual that comes on the DW5 flash drive says the following:
"This utility application will create a DiskWarrior Recovery Disk by copying the contents of an OS X Recovery disk and a serialized DiskWarrior application to a suitable flash drive. Once completed, you will be able to start up the computer from the DiskWarrior Recovery disk and run DiskWarrior. It is recommended that you do this for both maintenance and emergencies."

The "suitable flash drive", it goes on to say, will be erased. So I don't think you would want to do this with the original flash drive on which DiskWarrior ships. But the newly created recovery disk can itself be updated by the the Recovery Maker utility so you would only need this one newly created flash drive or disc through future System versions or even future versions of DiskWarrior.

I have a couple USB3 flash drives here, and YYMV. Some are fast, others notsomuch. Remember, if they say "USB3 SPEED!" they mean the interface, that's no guarantee that the flash ON the drive can match the speed of the USB bus. Read the fine print. Or better yet, read reviews that DO speed tests.

I've been using Disk Warrior from the earliest version 2. It worked fine until version 4 came out. It would slow down my mac and crash it so I had to reinstall OS X. After almost 4 years I have read all those "nice" reviews about this new update on version 5 and I purchased it again, which I regret now very much. Although, I have to say that It didn't crash my macs like version 4 did, but it still slows them down more then twice. Before I run DW 5 on my macs, I've tested the speed of the drives with 'Blackmagic Disk Speed Test' (this is a simple softwere to test read and write speed of your hard drive) and after running Disk Warrior 5 the speed of my macs become twice or more slower then it was before. I will never ever buy anything from Alsoft and would never ever recomend it to anyone.

My experience with DW has been nothing but positive. Each version seems to work better than the last, and version 5 is super fast.

EDIT: If anyone is looking for alternatives to DW, Other World Computing is having a sale on Drive Genius and Data Rescue. I'm tempted, but since I have both DW and TechTool Pro (plus a Time Machine backup and two clones), I'm not convinced hat I need either one.

Serge: Welcome to FTM!

I agree that DW is a great tool. What I like about version 5 is that it now gives you a "health status" report on all drives, which means you only have to run DW when the report drops out of the green zone.

Prior to reading this thread, I'd never even taken the flash drive out of the case. Much easier/quicker to just run DW from a backup drive.