The simplest approach from a design perspective is of course to use the standard maintenance forms. However, there are many other options available to tailor your applications look and feel to your own needs. StrataFlix shows an example of one such option. Which option you choose (standard maintenance forms, a StrataFlix like approach, a combination, or something completely different) is entirely up to you.

And, for the record, we use an approach very similar to the StrataFlix approach in our medical application .

I would say that it will depend on the application itself.  I am working on 3 projects now and I use the StrataFlix approach in one of them, another one, I use SF Maintenance forms because the application requires to manage several parent records all the time, like working with today's records during the day so they need to go from one parent record to another and the StrataFlix approach will simply not work in this case, and the 3rd one, I use a combination of the 2 approaches.