It's not so much that I "pretend that it doesn't exist", it's more that I would rather not do it at all, or if I absolutely must, do it sparingly.
It's not because I don't believe in the benefits, but again, it's more about the logistics and the extra button presses and re-learning how to actually play all over again (I make heavy use of the in-game menus and text commands, I always have done it this way).
I actually find the game's macro system to be very lackluster. It doesn't respond as well as I would like (half of the time, it takes nearly half a second for the macro buttons to display, keypresses do not always process, macro execution can be interrupted last I checked, and more issues).
They improved it by adding things like Gear Sets, and I hear that you can have macros switch books for you and I even thought of a way to make a decent macro set up, but I just don't like using macros.
I wish we could have an option to always have macros displayed on screen like hotbars in other MMOs, and assign number keys to them so one doesn't need to hold ctrl or alt to use them.
But, with the skeleton development crew we got now, I'm not really holding my breath for any kind of improvement like that. If it happens, that would be awesome. If not, well, I wouldn't be surprised in the least.