I almost never find graph usage useful, TBH (and flamegraphs are worse than useless). And perf's support for stack traces is always wonky _somehow_, so it's not easy to find good defaults for the cases where I need them (I tend to switch between fp, lbr and dwarf depending on a whole lot of factors).

Tell me about it!

I think I've only been able to get good call stacks when I build everything myself with the right compilation options. This is a big contrast with what I remember working with similar tools under MSFT environments (MS Profiler or vTune).

You can get it to work though but it's a pain.

To be honest I don't like Linux profiling tools at all. Clearly the people working on them have a very different set of problems than I do

I think it boils down to what Brendan Gregg likes. He must be doing somewhat different type of work and so he likes these defaults.