I did, and on the rare occasion that I need to use a downloaded binary today, still open it in a text editor and scroll through it for a cursory look. Packed -> reject. Bigger than expected -> reject. URLs or other strings, especially obfuscated, not related to expected functionality -> reject. Online AV multiscanners offer a reasonable alternative for those who aren't familiar with this sort of quick-glance RE, although they do have false positives too.
> Online AV multiscanners offer a reasonable alternative
You're right, (not just) online AV multiscanners are also FUD machines that will happily accept malicious programs but reject anything well crafted and optimized because it doesn't like exactly like the shit MSVC craps out with default settings.