Sean,
Your hitting the nail on the head.
Management and Supervisors often have insufficient understanding of those basics (process control). So when that old salt who put the pencil marks on the mig dials retires and the new welding machines come in, nobody can control the process.
With good process control the need for anti spatter stuff ought to be minimal.
However, in the roboitc production world, (especially in high detail work where spatter means extra cycle time) those products, especially the new in-line stuff is interesting.
I see tried and true parameters thrown aside often in industry simply because 75/25 with 035 wire 29 volts and 500 inches per minute will make a hot fast weld that is *strong enough*. Its hard to convince management to change operations on the floor to a slower feed rate or a gas mix that provides true spray transfer when they have been making welds for years the way they are doing it. (even tho it was never right according to the textbook) Unless there is a catostrophic failure or a costly reject rate people will as you say, "ignore the basics".
Sometimes the basics aren't ignored. Plenty of businesses are out there manufacturing componants and nobody in the entire facility has any process control knowledge. Now spatter compounds may lower the amount of cleanup, but if sidewall fusion is lacking due to the misguided notion that 500+ inches per minute and globular transfer boosts production, a spatter free heat affected zone will be of little comfort when the part fails.
Wow, there are a lot of sea stories that would come in here to bring home the point but thats too much typing for tonight.
So Yea, its mostly a Gizmo for folks looking for a fix to a problem that a little training would eliminate, but its also
a gizmo that has a legitimate nitch in the industry (robotics etc).