I've never understood these sorts of things. I don't have a philosophical problem with it, and I don't think that it leads to a generation of people who are tone deaf or anything like that. But it just doesn't seem practical. I don't know about you guys, but I never tune based on an electronic tuner with open strings. If I did, the guitar wouldn't be in tune when fretted at the peg-head end of the neck. I do have a tuner on my pedal board, but that's just used to set the open A string. Everything else is relative to that by ear. And how I tune it depends on what guitar it is (really, what brand it is...) PRS tends to have beefier frets, so I know if I tune the strings when open, the G and B strings will be sharp for example when playing chords low on the neck. So for PRS guitars, I tune the E and D string open, and relative to A by ear. I tune G, B, and high E while playing a "D" cowboy chord because it's pretty easy to tune that by ear. Play a couple of other various chords and tweak and it's done in a few seconds. Gibsons on the other hand tend to have similar intonation issues for whatever reason, so tuning using notes half-way up the neck seems to be a good compromise. But tuning with open strings rarely is the best compromise in my experience. If I've got songs in a set list that call for alternate tunings, I'll just tune a separate guitar up ahead of time...but lately, the only alternate tunings that I use is open-D, which doesn't require doing anything other than dropping the E string down.
