Pinch zoom is nice, but I am realizing more and more that it is honestly a bit gimicky and less functional for a browser.
It's really a matter of subjective preference. I find it very useful. YMMV. I know it's easy to perceive anything you don't get as gimmicky or overrated.
Sure YMMV, but it's not like I don't "get" it, it's just pinch-zoom, not rocket science. It is useful, and I'd love to have it in conjunction with the double-tap zoom, not as an either-or option. The primary reason for that is that double-tap works much better for single handed browsing. If you are browsing a 3-column site which isn't formatted for mobile devices it is much easier to browse via the stock browser. You double tap to zoom in on one columns text...once you;re done, you can double tap to zoom out to get a snapshot of the whole page again. Then double tap to zoom in on another column of interest with all the text aligned nicely against the left of the screen. If you tried that with just pinch-zoom, a) You'd have to use two hands, one to hold the phone, the other to perform the pinch-zoom. b) Zoom in on a column with pinch zoom, and then also manually scroll to align the left edge of the column with your screen. c) Once you're done, you'll have to pinch-zoom to zoom out, then scroll/pinchzoom to the new column and again re-align the left edge of the column. Double-tap is definitely a lot more convenient and works better in such scenarios.
Of course it does have its benefits with picture heavy/media rich sites when there isn't any real defined columns of text. However, in my daily browsing, I am usually doing far more of of the former than the latter and I find the double-tap to save me the most time.
Anyways, I did enable the regular droid zoom option in Dolphin, and that works well enough instead (although double-tap would be sweet imho). Now I am back to being as conflicted as ever on which browser I prefer.
