The problem is like 90% of people that lease w/o business expensing never do the math and just use some BS arguments how it's cheaper to lease or you can the car cheaper or something (see Kaido).
I would expect that vast majority of people would buy rather than lease if you'd present them with the actual total cost up front.
I can see you're rather emotional about leasing
Anyway, it depends on your situation. If you're the type of person who keeps their car for a long time, you can get a lot of mileage out of buying it. I usually don't keep my cars for more than about 5 years (mostly because I've always had clunkers and they break to the point of not being economical to fix). Leasing is almost never the most economical option, but economics are not the only metric involved in buying a car, and there are also short-term economics (monthly payments) and long-term economics (having a car you own, that you can sell or trade-in).
Financially, the value of the car after paying it off is one way to look at it. However, I also have to deal with the month-to-month costs, in my situation. So my financial argument is that (1) I typically don't keep cars longer than 5 years, and (2) I'd rather have a lower monthly payment, consistently, than a larger one, and then have to deal with paying for additional repairs such as brakes and tries down the road. At the end of that 5 years, if you had bought the car, you have the value of the car you can sell, and with leasing you have nothing. But month-to-month, the leasing rate is lower, which is beneficial to my existing budget. So in my particular case, leasing makes a lot of sense with to me.
We can talk about depreciation, new cars, newer & older used cars, leasing, and all kinds of stuff, but from my perspective, I like having a consistent, smaller monthly bill with no large repair costs and then swapping out cars. That's why I said in my original post that you need to have the right situation for it (particularly the mileage limitation) and you have to want to do it, because it's almost always better economically in the long-term to buy a car than to lease cars. But I'm sure you'll post a rebuttal to this, so have at it :wub: