As for it being less important, if either one takes excellent, excellent care of their machines, or does not care about such issues and just replaces either their Mac or the drive, then yes, there is no need for such a product. That's not for me.
The issue is not whether one is a ‘responsible’ computer owner by the exclusive virtue of running any or all system utilities one can bring to bear, but whether such behavior is necessary. It can be argued that over the years the changes/improvements in Mac OS X have markedly reduced the need to apply such utilities, as exemplified by the many users who worked their way through the lifespan of successive Macs without ever running into a problem that required the ministrations of a 3rd party utility. In this scenario, the utilities monitor things just fine, but rarely if ever have to actually
do anything. I would make an exception for the preventive value of things like SMART monitoring, but that particular option isn’t without its foibles either. And having ample backups renders the occasional hardware hiccup moot anyway.
