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.
And as further exemplified by Micromat and Alsoft, themselves, apparently having recognized that the value of their products is diminishing, because they've both expanded on the basic, critical functionality that carried them and the Mac community for years and turned TechTool Pro and DiskWarrior into Swiss Army Knives of sorts, arguably to maintain relevance.
And let's not forget that as the Mac platform expands it's reaching new users, many, perhaps most, of whom will likely never be aware that utilities such as TechTool Pro and Disk Warrior even exist, because OS X will likely never leave them in a bind that calls for either; the concept of regular maintenance will be alien to them, because it will not have a context in their Mac experience, nor will their Mac experience suffer from its lack.
Me, I'm joining the new user contingent
in a sense and not upgrading either TTP or DW until I
must, and
that may be several paid upgrades from now. (The availability of both utilities via d/l rather than snail mail as was once the case makes that position even more tenable: as long as you've got a bootable volume you can get the latest version of either utility within minutes of your needing it.)
