I can't say that I've got all that far with m2 yet, however what they used to be good at was "fixing" behavior of a plugin that didn't quite do what it should/could or allow you to set up a set of goals to be run with one command ... now as a rule I think a plugin that doesn't do what it could/should should be fixed, but the reality of it is that most developers don't have the luxury of waiting on the plugin developers or the plugin developers simply don't think it's important.
Another case was where we had a lot of tests of different types that had to be run at certain times (for instance, a set of unit tests before integration, and a set of automated acceptance tests). having the pre/post goals (not to mentions goals at all) made doing that very simple. For the moment I'll restrict my comments on the issue until I better understand how m2 should work. I can understand the stated reasons for not including that feature in m2 and I have yet to get deep enough into it to understand how to get the same functionality but I must admit I'm a bit concerned that one of the most powerful features of m1 is now gone.
