Most modern parser generators are capable of more than the author gives credit for. Bison/Flex, for example, can handle most of the issues mentioned (feedback from the parser back to the lexer for context-sensitivity, Flex start conditions for grammars within grammars, %prec to explicitly resolve conflicts). A project would need to have a very simple grammar or very stringent performance requirements to consider writing a parser by hand. "Parser generators can't handle my grammar" is usually a bad reason, although there are the rare exceptions.