Honestly, I have never seen the beneift of "user friendly url's". I think it's a myth.
First, URL's are far from friendly. They are confusing, long and not at all "user friendly". Phone numbers are even more friendly than URL's. A URL's saving grace is name recognition.
But have you ever tried to send someone to something like "
http://subdomain.example.com". You have the problem that some people will throw the http:// in there, but others will ask: "h-t-t-p?". Then they will always type in "www". Even if you tell them to type in "subdomain.example.com", they will prepend "www" to it. Even if you spell it out.
And as soon as you say forward slash, that confuses them. I have seen people stumble on this. They type a backslash instead, and I have to correct them. This usually means I also have to explain to them the difference between / and \.
Anyways, try giving them directories, and then explaining "uppercase or lowercase".
URL's are just evil.
It's better to have a clean interface on your site. It's a lot easier to tell someone to go to example.com, click on the products button, and then click on the "Printers", and then click on the "XJ-50 Model" than it would be to tell them to go to "example.com/Products/Printers/XJ50".
Because what happens when someone types in "example.com/Products/Printrs/XJ50"? Can your program handle that? Suddenly the person is plunged into a dark space.
Anyways, this thread isn't about usability, but about SEO. And you know what, I really don't buy this. I think it's a holdover from yesteryears, when search engines couldn't handle anything past "?". But this is no longer the case. In the sites that I run, having a normal ? and & url doesn't appear to be a hinderance. Today, it's less about the URL, and more about getting linked.
Why would I be against these types of URL's you guys are discussing? Having worked with them myself, I can say that they take a lot more work to setup, and work with, than normal URL's, and at least for me, they became a bigger problem than they were worth. Remember, by going the route of using something like mod_rewrite, you are introducing one more tool into the mix of tools that are needed to run the site. And the more things you introduce, the better chance there is of something going wrong.
Don't get me wrong, mod_rewrite is a great and stable tool. But from a purely production point of view, I didn't find it as useful as you might think. I think more time should be spent in the user interface of the site, assisting the user in navigating to where they want to go. If the user has to go to the URL to make the change, my site has failed.