I used it for a while, but I eliminated the “need” for this utility simply by reducing the number of menubar icons to bare minimum essentials. I found that most things people consider essential actually aren’t. Bartender is one of those things.
Although the developer has maintained this utility even through the SIP transition, I contend that it is a matter of time before the developer finds it either impossible or not worth the trouble to maintain it. TotalFinder, TotalSpace, Zooom2, Optimal Layout, FinderPop, to name a few. You might think it’s all Apple’s fault, but even Linux have something similar to SIP on OS X now. System-level protection is going to be tighter and tighter in the future, and it is evident that OS vendors don’t particularly appreciate third-party developers messing with something as fundamental as the menubar. It’s not a good idea from security standpoint even in a general sense.
The enthusiastic minority Mac fans will always say stuff like “I can not live without this utility!” But the reality is that the vast majority of users, even so-called power/professional users, don’t even care to have something like this. Here is how it always turns out; You buy a piece of software like this thinking you can miraculously improve the user experiences. Then, you start spending more time tinkering and troubleshooting as you use it more. Soon, you become a volunteer beta tester for the developer while you also become unnecessarily attached to its novel, optional functionality. After a while, you stop seeing updates and bug fixes, and then you painfully realize that the developers of the utility abandoned it for one reason or another. You will be left with a lot of frustration as a result of your novel setup ripped apart only because some developers no longer felt like doing anything with it. I'm sick and tired of this classic pattern with indie developers and wasting my time and money in the process.
I found that, in the long run, these “system enhancements” added more complexity, frustration and “needs” to tinker with, and that I was much better off just making good use of all the default features on my Mac. Any small gains in user experience are not worth the massive trade-off of depending on this type of utilities.