Except apple advises you not to use reference counting when trying to debug. So when reference counting doesn't work, you still have to go back and manually count the references yourself...
For better tools, check out Instruments, MallocDebug or leaks. Or read Apple's Memory Usage Performance Guidelines, specifically the "Finding Memory Leaks" section. [1] Apple's Technical Note TN2124 "Mac OS X Debugging Magic" even has, in the Cocoa section, an example of how -retainCount can be misleading and confusing. [2]
Nowhere does Apple advise Cocoa developers to avoid ref-counting. Cocoa's ref-counting/GC'd memory management system is considered a huge advantage for the platform.
[1] http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Perfor... [2] http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#technotes/tn2004/tn2...