I'm aware that there are two different conventions on this issue, so I just use parentheses to get the behavior I want.
But, growing up, as the top math student in my class, it never occurred to me that somebody out there wants -3^2 to equal -9, I thought it was just a weird quirk in some calculators/programs. How would you read that expression aloud? I think of it as "negative three squared" so that's why (-3)^2 makes sense to me. Do you say "the negative of three squared"?
In 8th grade, I remember being instructed to type such an expression into the calculator to observe how it does something contrary to what we expect it to. From that moment on, I thought, "Huh, guess you have to use parentheses." It certainly wasn't cause enough to throw out my calculator, let alone tell others not to use it, just because I prefer a slightly different precedence convention.