Doesn't matter to me. I don't care. I DO hit Command+Q. But so many new Mac users are hell bent on complaining about such a trivial "feature" as keeping apps open. I mean this isn't 1992. RAM isn't at the 8MB limit anymore. This is 2010. Apps that aren't doing anything don't really take up any resources. You might as well keep them running if you want.
Newbies will look for anything that isn't Windows-like to complain about. I tell you.
Every time I see someone complain about "The maximize button won't take up the whole screen!" I want to scream and throw a brick at them for their ignorance. But I don't because they are new and don't know better yet.
Also, about that file loss problem mentioned above, I had that happening once upon a time. It was like whenever I unmounted it, it was saving the changes. And if I accidentally disconnected the USB before ejecting the disk (Only one) it would lose all the files I had just copied over. Which made no sense at all because the files should be saved to the drive immediately. It's not like it's storing them in memory and waiting for you to save it manually. But that drive died shortly after, so I assumed it was doing this "Not saving changes" thing because the controller was dying. So, a word to the person who posted about losing 700MB, buy a new drive. That shit should not be happening. Not at all. Otherwise if it WAS supposed to happen, every time our computer shut off abruptly, due to a power outage or something, it would revert to the previous configuration. And since that doesn't happen, it's obviously not a "feature" of hard drives to forget changes.
I do wish though that OS X was smart enough to know when a drive was or was not being written to or read from so if we do disconnect a drive before ejecting, it would just eject gracefully without alerting us that something might be broken now. Seems to me technology needs to be designed smarter. This is why I prefer to keep all my other drives on a networked machine (Including backups. CCC has this ability, as does regular old Rsync. Not to mention Time Machine. Networked backups are so convenient it's not even funny.) that runs all the time so all I do is connect to the drive across the network, and don't have to worry about accidentally pulling the USB out prematurely.