I was during my US conversion taught very heavily to rely on checklists, which I rebelled against at times. I wouldn't mind it if the checklists were brief, but they're almost always overworked. So can the acronyms be. Thankfully most instructors agree that plowing through a 20 item checklist with nonsense in the traffic pattern whilst trying to spot 5 other aircraft isn't in the best interest of safety. But some were sticklers for it.
I use it for all my starts, runups, ground checks and after that I do it from memory. That said, I tend to forget things on shutdown as I then often skip the list. Last time I came back from lunch the radios were still on and the bloody master switch. Oops... So there certainly is a case to be made for them!
