TTiling has been my entire career as a self employed specialist and have over 30 years of experience as a professional tiler. I have worked on all kinds of jobs to individual home owners needing the kitchen or bathroom walls and floors tiled, to large contract housing projects as an individual or as part of a large team.
From my experience I have done what most tilers fear, working with expensive materials and the pitfalls with everything that goes wrong. You could say I have gone through pipes, electrocuted myself, bowing and poor work coming out from using wooden battens. Not to mention the amount of waste with wooden battens and standard spacers you can purchase and paying for the cost to repair any or all of these eventualities.
This does not work for a tiler in any way and creates undue stress and pressure when doing a job, no matter how careful you are, you will do at least one of these in a lifetime of work as a professional or a DIY person.