More care & technique required while cooking to keep things from sticking or burning, the seasoning and iron itself flavors acidic foods so the pans aren't as nearly-universally-useful as teflon, can't put them in the dish washer, cleaning in general becomes a kind of balancing act between leaving soon-to-be-rancid fat on the pan (which will flavor your next dish) and stripping the seasoning (you can't just clean everything off, completely, like you can with teflon or stainless).

It’s really not nearly as bad as you’ve made it out. Put some salt in the pan, rub it down, apply a thin layer of oil and good to go. Is not some occult ritual.

My pans and experience disagree, but OK. Sometimes that's true, sure, but getting a stuck-on mess off them is worse and more fiddly than other pans.

Recall, I do use cast iron, my wife's the one who finds it to be too much.

You don't even need that. Soap and water work fine.

Yeah soap is fine, I like the salt for abrasion.

If it comes off easily in cleaning, it’s not seasoning. It’s much easier to clean or cook on cast iron than Teflon for that reason — nothing short of power tools or an axe will render it unusable the way you can do with Teflon.

If this were as true as cast iron fans claim, teflon wouldn't have dominated home kitchens for decades, I expect.

I do cook on cast iron, but even the absolute very best cast iron pan I've ever cooked on (not mine—I get the cheap stuff, this was one of those perfectly-smooth beautiful hundred-plus-year-old pieces that'd been cared for quite well and was seasoned better than I've ever managed to get any of mine, despite trying every method that can be found online) wasn't as easy to cook on or to clean as teflon.

They beat teflon at searing and toasting (e.g. nuts or whole spices), mostly because teflon can't safely be heated to temps needed for those, but anything else? Very best case I've ever experienced, almost as easy to cook with and clean as teflon, worst case, way, way worse. Plus you've gotta keep acid away from the cast iron if you don't want your food to taste of iron and/or old polymerized fat, which really limits its utility.

[EDIT] It occurs to me—maybe people who find cast iron about as easy as teflon just cook extremely-different cuisine from what I do? I tend to do a lot of one-pan and sauce-and-starch-in-skillet stuff that's often hell in cast iron, if not just wholly inappropriate for it due to the acid levels. If way more of my cooking were steak-and-hard-vegetables dishes, say, I might wonder why people bother with teflon.

There’s also a cost factor: a Teflon pan will be considerably cheaper, and most people don’t factor in the service life. Once you’re used to something you usually replace it with the same thing.

The other trend was Nixon pushing low fat diets. By the time actual scientific results debunked that, a generation of Americans had adjusted recipes to avoid using as much fat as you need to cook optimally in cast iron and it’s still common to find people using techniques which pretty much require non-stick.

Cast iron is actually pretty cheap.

Cast iron has three fatal flaws.

It's heavy.

It rusts.

No dishwasher.

TBH I think it's less the pan and more the kitchen. Growing up I thought cooking in a cast iron was a pain because I had a really shallow sink, weak water pressure, and I cooked for my family so dishes would pile up.

I live in a place with extremely strong water pressure and a very deep sink, plus the faucet is one of those rope ones that can be held arbitrarily. It rips through anything on the cast iron, leaving it clean in under a minute. Cleaning is, in general, much much much faster in my new place - plus I have a dish washer so dishes don't pile up, only the cast iron (or some specialty knives, maybe) generally needs to be washed in the sink.

I cook a lot of sauces in the pan and it's all good now that I have the room and tools to clean it off.