Way I see it, there are places were texture tiling really works well, and others where UV mapping is better.
Tiling has a few advantages: 1. Texture size can be low. Which means that rendering them is comparatively cheap.
2. Tilemaps can be edited without having to look at the actual model. If the modeller was clever about it, it won't be a big effort to make it look good.
Disadvantages are:
1. Using tiled textures means you have to use several different textures to achieve a good, varied look. Even given that tilemaps are, on average, smaller than comparable UVs in terms of resolution, using lots of textures is still not a good idea.
2. Effects like baked ambient occlusion are impossible.
3. It is impossible to highlight details on a model without increasing the texture count.
UV maps, on the other hand, have these advantages:
1. Baking effects, like the aforementioned ambient occlusion, are possible
2. Low texture counts. With the way the FSO engine works, using as few textures as possible helps keep performance high. As a rule of thumb, for every texture slot in the model, the engine needs to do one render pass. Given that every texture slot on the model can effectively mean 4 textures (diffuse, glow, shine and normal maps), keepig the effective total down is a good thing, as it keeps texture swapping to a minimum.
I refer you to this:
http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=72780.msg1437359#msg14373593. It is easy to highlight model regions using texture details.
Disadvantages:
1. They take more effort to edit.
2. In some scenarios, the maps will look worse in terms of apparent resolution.
All in all, as far as I am concerned, the benefits of having a proper UV far outweigh the negative aspects. That, however, does not mean that UVs are always superior; there are cases where a good tilemap is a cheap way of getting a model to look good.