[microtonal]

I think I only had a noticeable mdworker problem (stuck process) once in my nine years of using Macs. Maybe I'm lucky to have had SSDs for a long time, but mdworker is something I rarely notice (in contrast to storedownloadd and others).

I think I use Spotlight almost a couple of dozen times each day to find documents, applications, and sometimes e-mails. So the productivity gains outnumber the marginal cost enormously.

Also, there is a healthy ecosystem around Spotlight. E.g., I use Alfred, which allows you to define use/custom workflows.

BTW. If you use Alfred, this is one of the nicest workflows I found recently: https://github.com/bevesce/unicode-symbols-search