It's easier to follow a technique that has been laid out before you than to examine your own childhood, your parenting models (i.e. mostly your own parents), the values you want to impart to your children, confront your parenting fears, confront left-overs from your childhood, explain your rationale to your partner and ignore the 'conventional' wisdom that everyone is very free with (can't tell you how many times I've been advised to use 'time-out' because it 'works'). Yes, it's harder. It takes a lot more brain-wrapping-arounding. It just is. And I only mean that it's harder to begin with and to cut out the 'chatter' of the 'shoulds' and the 'tsk-tsks' that come from people who don't know your children and won't be around when the going gets tough, anyway.
I know about many of these methods because lots of people I know use them. When they ask me about the way I do things they concede that they don't have the time or energy for it because of various life pressure reasons. It doesn't come 'naturally' in our society.
You can't tell me, without challenging yourself to read Alfie Kohn, Jan Hunt, Robin Grille or the PET guy (Gordon?), that it's as hard to learn as 1-2-3-magic, time outs, etc. Without reading something you know very little about, how can you say that? Whereas I've actually read about the other types of 'discipline' methods and decided against them.