I would say we had the initial issue with Sequences where you look at having other items beyond notifications happen I found the workflow to be the good medium.
Just to talk through how it works for us today. We actually are leveraging initial Contact Status/Company Statuses manually though we do still set the lifecycle.
When a Contact his a certain status it automatically create a deal here. The reason I like this is that specific contact is now associated with the deal, and so is the company. This way you can now trigger emails to that individual contact.
Where this has the downside is the workflow will not stop as it will with sequences unless you have specific goal criteria, and a reply to an email cant be one. So it would rely a bit more on the reps keeping up with items. Goals are amazing for stopping a workflow but you could also use some If/Then statements to control paths someone moves.
This gives you a ton more options with what needs to happen when, from tasks, emails, automatically updating the main and associated records. I really like being able to carry values across to sub-records to know where things have promoted. This way I can look at a specific associated contact and know where the attached deal is in the pipeline.
Hope that adds a couple more pennies to this convo.