This is typical for any forum I know of. Someone says sth insulting and then it all starts. At the end nobody gets something from the thread...
Why can't we stay on the subject and stop calling people words? It would be nice for a change, don't you all think?
The original question was, what the benefits of rooting are, and what the dangers. Thanks.
The benefits are basically about control and about what you can do with that control. As that XDA mod mentioned in the video, there's tons of malicious apps that can do some pretty bad things.. most of these you won't find on the play store for a number of reasons, is against Google's ToS, is against the law, etc.. that wifikill app he mentions, it floods routers with de-auth signals and drops every single person from a router and prevents anyone from connecting back to it.
The downsides of root are apps you install also have full control over the root partitions, and if you install apps that aren't on the Google play store, you could in theory be installing an app that says it does one thing, but winds up completely messing up your system. Or you could install an app that turns your phone into part of a botnet, chewing threw data.. or you could install viruses, or steals your pics and uploads them to a server in China. Any number of known things could happen.
If you don't plan on being malicious, or going to heavily mod the android framework you shouldn't need root. Even if you want to backup your data, you don't need root. You can use Koush's Helium app.
The #1 reason I rooted in the past(I no longer do) is for Ad-block plus. Imagine how much data you save by not seeing ads(You can opt to still see non-intrusive/non-annoying ads)? Problem is I think Google's rendered the app useless with Kitkat 4.4 as it no longer seems to work..