I run Linux in legacy mode on my 4 machines. UEFI for me was extra complexity without any gain. Sad to see that's uefi is gonna be only option in the future.
I've been booting with the kernel as an EFI stub, and I love it. I can copy a new compiled kernel to the right directory, and reboot into it. No grub involved. And to edit the boot menu, or just change what I'll boot into next, is the handy efibootmgr tool.
Unfortunately, that means you don't have an initrd so you can't do luks encryption of your root, support certain filesystems as root (like zfs, mdadm raid), or various other things.
efistub kernels may work for some people, but they're not a generic solution.
Wait. Couldn't you compile the initrd into the kernel?
You can't stick an initrd on the end of an efistub kernel?
That's totally false. Just yesterday I booted a kernel using the EFI stub and was able to use an initrd.