[norkakn]

I imagine that you are working in a domain where it is true that R-Trees are slow and only have the one redeeming quality. Anything that I've done involving things on a screen have performed better with quadtrees for me, so I'm not discounting your experience at all.

In other domains though, R-Trees have many other advantages, and often perform better.

http://www.dpi.inpe.br/livros/bdados/artigos/oracle_r_tree.p...

"For these datasets, R-trees consistently outperformed Quadtrees by 2-3 times" ... "In short, a quadtree could be recommended for update-intensive applications using simple poly-gon geometries, high concurrency update databases, or when specialized masks such as touch are frequently used in queries. However, users have to fine-tune the tiling level to obtain best performance. R-trees, which do not require any such tuning, could be used in all other cases to obtain nearly equivalent or better performance."