Export WebDriver Code - Selenium IDE vs Selenium Builder

The following words are my opinion and I don't want to hurt someone's feelings but Selenium IDE (or Builder) should be mostly used as a 'helper' in your testing activities. To rely for code or execution on such (capture-replay) tool is not serious. Why!? First it's poor maintainability and repeating code. Next is a need of some additional language (JS) support for even most simple operations.

If you think twice - you'll see that WebDriver or Selenium 2.0 is way better solution. Yes- you can export code, but like you said the result is not very good. I agree that you can reuse this auto-generated code, but again you'll have to implement additional logic by yourself in order to replace/extend some snippets. And this so called help will require additional time to be 'civilized' with your Framework solution. On the other hand if you already have good Framework support - it's architecture will take care of this (base classes, Singleton, tests-case 'skeletons' etc.)

In my practice I've used IDE in some very tricky cases when I needed to be sure that the Selenium finds the particular web-element indeed. One key advantage I found about Builder is the multi-browser support.