Somehow I knew that my heresy would incur criticism. But, let's put use of the ADF en route in perspective. If your aircraft even has one these days, that is. Good airmanship suggests tuning en route NDBs to verify correct GPS or FMS inputs, but actually using it en route in today's strict environment of required navigation accuracy is more likely to be on an IR test only - hence that comment.
Or when Mr Garmin does a dummy spit, as happened to me only this week when ferrying the bugsmasher to its new home in Tassie. (Sadly, said bugsmasher has no navaids other than a compass, but it was good enough, even with 25 degrees of drift).
As for keeping the needle on the nose being "bloody dangerous", consider the buffers that are imposed on NDBs when calculating en route LSALT. It would take a helluva crosswind component combined with serious disregard of heading and altitude to put one in danger. However, to satisfy the pedant among us I will modify my advice to: tune the station ahead as soon as able and follow the needle on the nose until you are CLOSE enough to be satisfied that the bearing is good enough to apply drift correction as necessary.
By following my own "bloody dangerous" advice I prevented one ferry pilot from taking us nearly 40 degrees in the wrong direction one dark night over the Pacific and on another occasion stopped my F/O from straying us into Russian airspace in the days when one got shot down for such mistakes. And guilty as charged, I once backtracked the distance number on the chart, because it was similar to the bearing number, in terms of the quadrant I expected (the old 153 versus 135 blunder). Only realised my cock-up when I put the needle on the nose to listen to some distant music on AM and looked at the RMI angle.
And before you shout/shoot me down for that, a powerful AM broadcast station on the nose is a better en route aid than an NDB too far behind the aircraft. Legal or otherwise.....