I am also a strong proponent of the feature based methods, but I think the direct methods definately still have a place in matching work.

First of all, for short baseline pairs and for frames with differential motion, direct methods blow feature based methods out of the water. I have yet to see any feature-based method solve the flower garden sequence (which happens to be basically a toy problem for the direct people).

That said, if coarse-to-fine processing really makes direct methods on par with feature based methods for large disparity, where is a successful piece of research doing just that?