In my world polylines are preferred for better than 95% of everything I ever draw.
The biggest problem I run into with polylines in the Civil world is that some commands (namely Line/Curve from end of object) do not work on them. I regularly need to explode polylines (or trim off the last segment and explode it, or draw a temporary line/curve over the last segment, etc.) in order to use these commands. And FILLET regularly gives poor results on polylines - I often have to explode a polyline in order to use FILLET on it, or use the TTR option to draw a circle, and then hand-create the fillet by trimming the polyline and circle.
Then there are the problems with polylines in C3D Parcels. I still use them a lot, because there are also advantages to using polylines to create Parcels. But they can have bizarre side-effects, due to bugs in the program, such as "jumping labels" if you have to later edit the line. And by simply grabbing a Parcel Label and moving it to the dragged state, I have had all Parcels along a polyline reset, with all Parcel info (number, styles, UDPs, etc.) returning to default values. And there's more.
But I still use polylines a lot. I just often find the need to flip things back and forth between polylines and lines/arcs.