What is the point of Mission Control?

I have been a Mac user since 1987, when I got my first SE/30.  I understand a LOT about the Mac OS, and I consider myself and expert. For the life of me, however, I cannot figure out the point of Mission Control (or Exposé or Spaces, for that matter).  Let me explain, and ask if anyone here can clear this up for me.
As I understand it, the point of Mission Control is to make it easy to access various open applications in an uncluttered workspace/desktop.  If this is the case, then how is this better than, say, Quickeys, which I have used forever? 
In other words, I typically use the following applications, all open at the same time: Word, Mail, Safari, my office accounting program, iTunes, iChat, and maybe one or two more.  I use Quickeys and have assigned a keyboard shortcut for each - for example, control-E for mail; control-s for Safari; control-W for Word, etc.  It is second nature for me to immediately go to, say, Mail by pressing control-E.  Bringing the app to the front is literally instantaneous.
I "get it" that, say, Safari can show below Mail, or iTunes can show behind Word, but that (multiple windows partially overlappiong each other) has never bothered me - indeed, I've never even considered it something worthy of worry.
Thus, my question is, how does Mission Control do this - navigation of open applications - better than Quickeys? Is it simply and only to avoid the "behind the window clutter"?  If so, is the contortion needed to activate Mission Control - removing fingers from keyboard, clicking mouse, navigating mouse to proper desktop, and returning keys to keyboard - worth it? If so, how?  There has to be something else to this Mission Control that I am just missing.
Could one of you enlighten me?
Thanks!

Different people have different ways of working and long ago I discovered the joys of virtual desktops (think mission control). Since System 7 (when the multi-finder stopped being optional) I've been keeping lots of programs open at the same time. The problem with that is the desktop gets very cluttered very fast and getting to the right window of the right program can be challenging. Thankfully between 3rd party tools and Apple's own built in tools we have many ways of dealing with this. Mission Control (virtual desktops) is one of them.
I have assigned related programs to a single desktop. I have the Programming Desktop where the terminal, BBedit, Racket, and Xcode tools live. I have the Writing Desktop where Pages, Word, and InDesign live. And so on. This cuts down on the clutter of my display since only a couple programs appear on a single virtual desktop. Where Mission Control itself comes into play is when I need to get a resource from one Desktop to another. Say I'm writing an email and need to refer back to a document in Word. I might open the document in Word (which would move me into the Writing Desktop) then I'd shift to Mission Control and drag that Word document's window into my Internet Desktop so it would temporarily reside along with Mail so I could look at both the Word document and my email.
It isn't the only way to work but I've found it very convenient and indispensible on my notebook. On my work desktop where I have two displays my workflow is a little different since I have lots of REAL window space.

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