well, if I have an object on the heap and I want a lot of things to use it at the same time, a shared_ptr is the first thing I reach for. If I have an object on the heap and I want to enforce that no one else but the current scope can use it, I always reach for a unique_ptr. Of course, I know you know all of this, you have used it almost daily for 7 years.

In my vision, I could use a raw pointer, but I would have to worry about the lifetime of every object that uses it and make sure that it is safe. I would rather be safe that those bugs probably won't happen, and focus my thinking time on fixing other bugs. Not to mention that when using raw pointers the code might get more confusing, when I rather explicitly specify what I want the object lifetime to be just by using a smart pointer.

Of course, I don't really care how you code your stuff, if you are comfortable in it. Though I am interested in your point of view in this. I don't think I've come across many people that actually prefer using raw pointer on modern C++.