I am not going to get into an endless argument
And then you added two paragraphs to argue your point!
You can follow the link in my sig to see if I might have some "professional experience" too. All I can say is if it didn't work great for the vast majority of users (since it is enabled by default), then I am sure many of my clients would be yelling at me, and my shop (not to mention this site and the other tech support forums I frequent daily) would be inundated with computers having the problems you suggest they definitely would have. But my clients are not yelling at me, I don't see those computers flooding my shop, or lots of posters complaining here at Sysnative, or at other sites either.
I am not saying it never happens - just that it is not the problem you pose it is. And it is surprising how many of those actual problems can be cleared simply by rebooting.
As for hibernation in W7, not sure your point about it being discouraged. By default, for a PC (laptops are different) Windows 7 uses the "hybrid" sleep mode. And since the vast majority of users stick with the defaults, again that was not the problem you suggest it is.
they must know that it's a good idea, on occasion, to do a Restart and not to just perpetually keep doing Shutdown
Ummm, sorry, but this makes no sense. Did you mean to say "
and not to just perpetually keep letting it go to sleep?"
A restart (or a shutdown) will reset the hibernate file (or Registry entry pointing to it) because either will automatically close all your open applications. So when it comes back up, you are at your desktop, not where you left off - as happens with hibernate (including hybrid sleep).
Plus, I think it important to point out Windows Update and many security program updates frequently require Windows be rebooted. So again, Fast Boot would be reset.
I never manually shutdown unless I will be doing maintenance or leaving town or something like that. I just let all my computers go to sleep.