Shares or no shares? What’s your personal opinion and philosophy?

I personally like owning shares. They aren’t depreciating assets like long options, they will always have a delta of 1.0, you can sell calls against them for realized cash, they pay dividends, and best of all, they appreciate in value. But some ppl don’t like owning shares because it is capital intensive. In other words it’s expensive when compared to strictly trading spread, etc. for example 100 shares of SPY is >$40,000. That’s a lot of money you could leverage for credit spreads. So I can see both sides. What’s your opinion?