FFF is right to bring up the issue of noise abatement, of which more anon. Meanwhile, I agree with Kirstey. We all moan about people flying huge circuits but never admit to doing them ourselves. My circuits were huge when I was learning to fly, because I could not handle the workload and took too long to do things. One of the many pleasures of the post-solo consolidation phase, and the early PPL phase, was learning how to juggle speed, flaps settings and the like in order to fit in safely with with other traffic at various airfields .
I do suspect, however, that too many people are taught to fly circuits as automata (you fly at THIS speed and no other, you turn HERE and nowhere else, you lower flaps HERE and never elsewhere), and these habits can stick, particularly if you don't fly often. I wonder if there is too much emphasis on putting circuits together, component by component, rather than teaching people what their aims should be in approaching, joining and landing.
As for noise abatement: I agree that we cannot ignore, out-shout or otherwise defeat the opponents of our hobby and must accomodate them as best we can, but there are are places where the imposed circuit patterns give you little or no option for a safe forced landing (Elstree springs to mind, and I don't say this in order to re-start the Elstree-slagging cycle).
At other places, there are safe landing options from the circuit , but you will never make the airfield (with its fire-crew, phones etc). When the engine failed on me, turning downwind on the day my instructor had planned to send me solo, the instructor, taking over, initially pointed us at the airfield to land downwind, but immediately abandoned that plan, realising that it could not succeed, and put us down smoothly in a convenient field closer by. I mention this because, when the donkey died, we were exactly where the noise abatement pattern for that airfield said that we should be. That put us out of range of the airfield (especially in a Mark 1 Gliding-Brick aka Beagle Pup, but a Cessna or Piper wouldn't have made it either).