[Nick Batzdorf]

My answer is an argument to authority: myself. :)

I've used Migration Assistant many times and found it to work really well 100% of the time. Furthermore, I don't do clean installs if I can help it, just because of the setup time.

Now, if you run Pro Tools and little else on your computer, it's not a big deal just starting over every time - which is exactly what I'm going to do on a separate startup drive. But if you have lots of other music/audio software as well, and things like MS Office and Photoshop, including many updates over the Internet over the years... Migration Assistant (or restoring from current image backups) is the only choice.

What's important is maintaining good backups - including images of your system in a working state.