I might even get convinced otherwise with some examples ... !!!
At least I have tried to expose an issue with concrete examples on why the pipe is so important. No examples have come to defend the cascade... of course in a context of a new Smalltalk.
Pick your battles, there's absolutely no reason to confuse the issue of adding a pipe with the issue of an existing feature the cascade.
The pipe thing is a good idea, but it's totally unrelated to cascading, and cascading is deeply embedded into Smalltalk, so it's a waste of energy discussing it, it's not going away and it's not going to change. Focus on the pipe idea instead.
As for cascade examples, see the Seaside web framework, the html api relies heavily on the cascade operator to set attributes on tags. It's not enough to "hope" that some method returns self, I'd have to verify that assumption constantly, the cascade guarantees me the receiver of the following selector. There are also many times you don't want a selector returning self, and cascading allows me to still call those selectors inline without the need for a temporary variable.
Ramon Leon http://onsmalltalk.com