VM is great, no doubt. it's useful for almost any purpose, but say you wanted to angle a circle shaped brush slightly, it's not possible with the vertex tool as it creates errors (try it if you don't trust
).
the clip tool is great for cutting a large brush up to the right sizes you want, without having to create a lot of new brushes (a pain, always).
to solve the problem of stretched textures, simply open the tex tool, highlight the texture, and tick
to Face. that sorts it out
a good mapper will take advantage of all the tools, and exploit their pro's while avoiding the con's