The pitch bend wheel has become second nature to me, almost like using a clutch with a manual transmission. I need it.

I have the joystick on the PA80, which controls both pitch and modulation. I don;t use the mod function as often, but it's very useful when working with certain patches / sounds, such as changing the rotation effect speeds on organ patches.

In the Motif ES, I set up some of my user patches so that the mod wheel doesn't control modulation at all, but instead it's applied to control some other parameter, such as an effect depth or filter cutoff.
Very useful tool in that respect.

AJ