I'll say this much for myself. FFlogs and parses are the reason I went from a grey parsing WHM in SB to getting all purples and a couple or oranges on SCH. It's how I knew I needed to improve because somebody with a parser was telling me everything I was doing wrong, and is why now I have gotten purples on my first clears for e1s-e3s so far, and here's hoping it's the same for e4s when my group gets that down.

Parsers themselves are not evil, and if used correctly, they are a great tool for self improvement.