I consider it good to have in case of need to press the red button, and bought myself a floating VHF with GPS to use when I leave the cockpit. The hope is I'll be able to talk my wife through dropping sails and direct her back to me under power in case I become a MOB, and to have a plan B if single-handing to call for outside help. Considering I generally stay within 20 nm of land, I think it's more likely to bring fast assistance than a PLB.

The problem with MMSI is they haven't taken it to the step of being user friendly -- need mnemonics, not numerics, so people can remember names, and the user interfaces need to be improved... with full alpha-numeric keypads in the VHFs. When it comes to MMSI we're still in the computer equivalent of "command-line" text interface vs. the graphical UI's we have today. It's like trying to use the web by using only IP numbers, as if there were no DNS.