Are CFINSERT and CFUPDATE as bad as everyone makes them out to be?

G'day
This is a bit of a lazy-Sunday sort of posting.  I was on the Adobe forums last week, and CFINSERT and CFUPDATE came up in conversation.  The person asking the question was asking about <cfqueryparam> and I responded to that (and cross referenced to my post on that topic, should you want to read it), but I mostly left the <cfinsert> and <cfupdate> side of things alone, sniffing with distain and moving on to something else.

I decided I didn't like leaving the question unanswered, so revisited it today.

I could recall a discussion a while back about these two tags not parameterising their values, which kinda invalidates them in my view.  But I decided to find out where they're at now.

I found this bug that was raised on the old bug tracker which covers this topic, and the ticket is still open so it seemed like the problem still existed.  However I never trust the Adobe bug tracker because... well... err... it's just not very good and not very accurate, so I decided to re-investigate for myself.  I knocked together some quick code, thus: