I'm definitely not saying that awk is neither fast nor efficient. It is indeed!
In my case, the only thing I can do with awk is printing a column. Looking at your history, I must admit I have no idea what these one-liners are doing. So in my case, I feel guilty for using awk because I really have no *real* reason to use it. It is, IMO the same thing as using sed to replace all occurences of 'a' by 'A' (assuming you have no other use for sed on your system). `tr` would be better suited because it does only this.

I do agree, however, that nowadays memory/diskspace is cheap. So installing sed/awk instead of tr/cut is irrelevant. It's just that, I don't know, if I was offerend a magic cooking robot with hundred feature, but that I would only use it to mix eggs, I'd feel like I'd waste it. And I don't like wasting things.

(Ok, the idea of "wasting" awk is stupid, but really, that's close to what I feel!)