You know, this is true. And I've read any number of "you should never use dd, use this instead" articles over the years. But man, do I love me some dd.
dd is the software equivalent of removing the riving knife from a table saw.
Then again, I get very paranoid when I write software that has to delete arbitrary files recursively. One bad string gets in there and it's a very bad day.
Funny how we never confirm our hypothesis that "checks out".