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No homer, a tripod isn’t always a better choice, isn’t always a possible choice, and is not always an allowed choice.

Setting up your gorilla pad on the middle of a road won’t get your camera very far off the ground. Setting up a tripod on the middle of a road gets you a good chance of causing an accident, and not standing on the middle of that road for a few seconds won’t get you the framing you want. Now what do you do?

Many musea, churches and other interesting places that do allow indoor photography often do not allow tripods. What do you do?

Increase ISO?

Surely is an option, if you have the ISO range, but being able to use 2 or more stops lower ISO will do a lot for the quality of your images, so that really isn’t a good alternative when a slower shutter speeds would be acceptable for the scene.

And that lower shutter speed can be quite high still. Just consider a 300mm lens, and shooting at 1/160. This is way below what most people can do hand-held, but may be quite enough to freeze any motion in the scene. Most people would want at least 1/500, but 1/1000 is much safer. IS will however make that 1/160 quite a manageable shutter speed still.

You are technically right that it is absurd to say image stabilization is a total ‘must have’ feature for everyone, but that misses the point really.

First your ‘but we have been shooting pictures since forever without it’ argument. This is true, but, we have been shooting pictures for more then half a century without ‘through the lens viewfinders’, so obviously they are not needed. Technically right, but it totally ignores that a camera that does have one is really a much more convenient photography tool for many conceivable situations. The argument that there exist other ways of achieving good results (such as a sports finder) does nothing to change that. The argument that there are many situations where it isn’t needed, or doesn’t help much if at all also doesn’t change that.

Very few people will argue that a ttl finder isn’t a must-have feature for a serious camera, despite more then half a century of proof of it not being needed.

And the same is the case with your argument about IS. Yes, technically you are right, but it really ignores the value of progress and the fact that such newer technology allows for taking pictures in situations that would be extremely difficult or impossible without it.

This goes to the point of there being a very significant price difference between otherwise highly similar lenses when one has a form of IS/OIS/VR and the other doesn’t. Seemingly enough people think it a relevant feature to pay that premium. Interestingly, for m4/3 lenses, that premium price isn’t there, but go look at the difference between otherwise quite comparable lenses for the F mount for example, and you’ll see what I mean.

It also shows whenever Olympus announces a new lens from the number of people using a Lumix camera complaining about the lack of OIS in those lenses.

So Homer, deal with it, it is a very desirable feature for many people, enough so that they will indeed involve it in their decisions when buying a camera and lenses.

Obviously, this all isn’t a reason for people to go whine about a Lumix camera not having IBIS, that is just silly, as people simply can buy something else, can buy stabilized lenses, and Panasonic isn’t going to change their ways in this all of a sudden.