Ok - if the N elements you want to add would cause more than 1 reallocation by constant size factor, yes I can see that. (also I just saw that resize() has the same allocation behaviour as reserve() has, so scratch my suggestion above).

Never had a problem myself with that though, my main use case for std::vector is with reserve() right at the beginning and never provoking a reallocation (so I often end up coding up my own container to assert reallocation can't happen accidentally).

Sometimes (infrequently) I use the script-style push_back()-only pattern. But I feel very uneasy about uncontrolled reallocations in larger systems, and anyway they constrain the implementation space because of pointer and iterator invaliation.