That's an extremely silly reason not to use a specific tool: Tool A provides an alternative way to do X, but I want to do X with some other tool B (that'll also work with tool A), so I won't be using tool A.

Send/receive may or may not be the right answer for backing up even on ZFS, depending on what exactly you want to achieve. It's really nice when it is what you want, but it's no panacea (and certainly no reason to avoid ZFS, since its use it 100% optional).