> Advantages of man over "--help":

You can have the best both worlds if the manpages are built automatically from the "--help" output (e.g., using help2man). Then you can have "-h" give a brief rundown and "--help" give the full docs.

> FWIW I think that texinfo is (mostly) even better than man, as it considerably improves on the navigation

I am curious about that. Do you really like texinfo navigation? I find it completely unusable, to the point of prefering to download and print a pdf from the web instead of opening (gasp!) the dreaded "info" program.