Personally i find rm too accepting, and rm -i too restrictive.
Using rm on its own will happily perform the command without further verification.
On the other hand, rm -i will request a yes/no on every last file involved.
Personally i have taken to using mc for any "complex" file system manipulations.
A lot of distros also alias "rm" to "rm -i", something that many users explicitly disable. Its a complex problem of security vs usability where most discussions has been rehashed several times.