Don't forget share buybacks. In fact these days large investors hate dividends since they are immediately taxable. Much better to keep inflating the share price and get a line of credit against it.
You, as an investor, want to save money for longer than one quarter. You want to save money for 20 years. So you'd like to avoid 80 taxable events in those twenty years, especially as you are just going to be reinvesting those dividends anyway. You want the law of compound interest working in your favor and then you pay taxes when you actually sell.
E.g. at a 20% tax rate say a stock pays a 4% dividend once per period and has no capital gain. Suppose you invest $1 and want to hold that for 2 periods, reinvesting the dividend and then selling.
Then after the first period you get 3.2 cents (after taxes) and you now own $1 and 3.2 cents. After period 2 you get $1.065024. Then you sell for a profit of 6.5024 cents (there are no capital gains)
But if the stock pays no dividend and has a 4% capital gain, and you hold for two periods, sell, and then pay the 20%, you will make 6.528 cents.