Chris, I can agree with most of your points.  Maybe I need to make my point in a different way.  Know your audience.  Know who you are programming for.  If you are writing a program for yourself personally, structured text or scripting would be fine.  However, if you are writing a program for a facility in which the equipment is maintained by personnel that are familiar with ladder logic or have little programming knowledge at all - then I would maintain you need to stay with ladder.  Likewise, if you are in a facility that uses nothing but function blocks or scripting - then you should stay with that.  With that said, and knowing that the majority of facilities use ladder, you eventually will have to learn and understand ladder logic.