Ola, I'm not the least bit offended, after all it is I that have insisted over and over again that 1) ad_form is just a wrapper and 2) you have to understand how the underlying form builder works to make effective use of ad_form for complex forms.
Jerry - one point not mentioned above is that self-submit forms make it easy to implement in-form error messages, much more user friendly than the old acs 3x paradigm of putting up a separate page that lists errors and suggests you hit the back button to fix them.
This is my major reason for preferring the self-submit paradigm for form handling. As a developer I feel like it is my job to deal with more complex code or development if the result is significantly more user-friendly than an alternative approach, and I believe in-form error messages to be an example of this.