Well, yes seeing is believing. I know of a custom built security robot that can issue akills against an attack of thousands of warbots, based on information stored in one hash table, in a matter of one or two seconds. This sort of power could never be achieved with variables of any kind, and I dare to say regardless of the platform or application used.
Back at the level of the humble user, I run a couple of scripts that require raw events to be silenced while their information is diverted to dialogues and then for seemlessness and reliability purposes be available again in the normalmode of replying by echoing to the active window. I use hash tables for this because variables (local or global) cannot keep up with the responsiveness I want. It's a shame in a way because runnign a local variable requires less code, but that's just how it is.