If you don't need or are interested in what other people are working on, maybe your team is too big?
Or sometimes you just really don't care.
Agreed. Hearing about the minutiae about someone's task is tedious. To me the daily scrum is like getting home and asking your significant other "how was work today?". Boring question, boring answer.
I definitely prefer the asynchronous approach. That way if I don't care about what you're working on (or vice versa), we don't need to waste time standing in a room together.
If you can't learn from what they're saying, don't need to know it, and can't contribute, then you shouldn't be there. This is why we use feature crews as a subset of the team.
If part of my work depends on theirs, or requires specific coordination, I'll use whatever mutually agreeable medium to exchange the information that is needed.
I've never really felt like I didn't know what people on the team were working on, despite not having a daily meeting or weekly status.
I don't get the blockers thing either. If I'm blocked, you're getting an email or IM immediately. I'm not going to wait until the weekly status email, or even the next day, to tell you. And I'm not going to bother the people who can't do anything about it.
But understand the hesitation. And if someone is blocked, agreed, it should result in a quick email or IM. Of course, if you spent all day yesterday trying to figure something out but are just feeling kind of stuck, standup call is a great place to say, "hmmm, I can keep working on this, but if someone has some time, I could sure use a second brain to help."