Abdominal Exam: are we just wasting our time?

To start with a difficult admission: I have a fairly long history of doing a poor abdominal exam, despite being very interested in this bedrock of the physical examination. In fact, I love the physical exam, in theory; but I have recently found that, in practice, I have been sorely lacking in both technique and the willingness to perform up to my knowledge.
How this came about:
I was recently working in a small emergency room with a group of non-emergency-trained physicians. Old school guys. A bit behind on the newest information, but overall not bad physicians. I went in to see a woman complaining of abdominal pain, got an appropriate history, and then performed my abdominal exam. Maybe a little questionable, but overall a benign exam. I went to chat with one of the docs about her and he went in to do his abdominal exam. Acute abdomen. CT scan showed florid diverticulitis. She was admitted to the hospital for IV antibiotics.
The very next day, a middle-aged woman came to the ED complaining of, what else but lower abdominal pain. I decided to test myself. After taking her history - relatively unimpressive (resolving abdominal pain, currently about 2/10 and more "achy" than really "painful") - I began with my "old" (I now refer to as "crap") abdominal exam. Benign in the truest sense of the word. Then I did a thorough exam. Acute abdomen with rebound tenderness localized to the right, lower quadrant and a strange variant of Rovsing's sign (palp in the LLQ made both LLQ and RLQ hurt). Suddenly suspicious of significant pathology, I ordered a CT and... acute appendicitis. She was wheeled off to surgery.
The real lessons I learned were to push hard - it may hurt more, but it also tells you more, and if you must, give the patient morphine first (it actually seems to bring out pathology rather than cover it up) - and do a real, honest-to-God rebound tenderness test - jerk your hand off the patient's belly (it really does make a difference). Furthermore, when evaluating for rebound tenderness, try in several locations. The lady with the appendicitis only reacted when I tested her RLQ. And the heel jar test does NOT necessarily correlate with peritoneal irritation. Both ladies had a negative heel jar but positive rebound tenderness.
It's too late to get into it right now, but I want to incorporate this with a discussion on the use of CT scans. The SMART EM podcast has a fantastic discussion of the risks of CT scans (I highly recommend it) that would go well with a discussion of the utility of an excellent physical exam. There was also a recent article concerning the use of serial abdominal exams rather than CT in the pediatric population for diagnosing acute appendicitis. Not to mention some excellent scoring systems (the one I am most familiar with is the Alvarado Score). I'll try to get back to this later.