You forgot to mention that AF is useless for macro.
As shown by this shot of taken for "National Talk Like a Pirate Day," AF can and does work under the right circumstances.
I'm not a professional, nor do I even want to be a professional, so please feel free to sneer at will. However:
-- I do know professionals who own this lens. Nikon's only sold about 150,000 of them, though.
-- The need for DOF in macro work means that often sharpness is diffraction limited. (With the 105mm VR wide open at 1:1, you have between 1/3 and 1/2 a millimeter of DOF, depending on format).
-- At minimum focus, it's true that VR isn't very useful. but in the "near macro" range, often used for flowers, fungi, and larger bugs, VR is quite valuable indeed. I also find VR useful in general at "golden hour," but I suppose that's a matter of shooting style and subject choice.
-- For copystand shots, 150mm or 180mm is inconveniently long. While either could work for the doubloon shown above, here is a much larger "Piece of 8" where I would have run out of copystand in DX format:
Note that in this thread, we now have claims that the 105mm VR is both too sharp and not sharp enough. I've never bought into the "too sharp for portraits" claim. First, many of the legendary 35mm film portrait lenses are razor sharp. For example, photodo gives higher MTF scores to both the 105mm f/1.8 and f/2.5 AI-s than any 105mm Micro-Nikkor. Second, try this simple test. Take an eyelashes hair and place it next to a pore or skin blemish from the same person. Unless you like your portraits with cartoon-like solid eyelashes, you're going to see blemishes. My solutions, in order of preference, are make-up or post-processing. With film, I also used soft-focus filters of various types.
Still, while all lenses are engineering compromises, there are some other reasons why the 105mm VR is less than ideal for portraiture. For DX, it's both a bit long by conventional standards. The maximum aperture is a bit on the narrow side. To my eye, bokeh is okay, but it shouldn't surprise anyone that the $1000+ portrait Nikkors have the edge for candids and environmental portraiture. (Against a studio backdrop or seamless paper, bokeh is far less of an issue.)
But the biggest problem with using this lens for portraiture is focus accuracy. Like every macro lens I've ever used, including the cult classic Tokina, most of the focus throw of the 105mm VR is dedicated to close range work. You only have about 10 degreess of throw between 5 and 10 feet. This makes focusing manually much more difficult, and I'm convinced makes the AF system a bit less accurate as well in those ranges.
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I miss the days when I used to be nostalgic.
