You should try it again. It's gotten quite good at automatic reloading. I use it with Rspec and as long as you've got spring-commands-rspec[0] installed, it's never a hassle.
Agreed. I've been using spring for about 1.5 years now and it has saved me huge amounts of time. The only time it hasn't picked up changes was on initializers and the router, which is understandable. I can't imagine developing without spring. I would be restarting rails hundreds of times per day.
[0] https://github.com/jonleighton/spring-commands-rspec