There are many, many kinds of maths, some that have been abandoned long ago, and many still waiting to be explored. Personally, I found Trig to be the easiest family of Math that I have ever taken. Based on fairly simple principles - if you understand Pythogorean theory, then all else is derived. And even after you forget the theory, sine, cosine, and tangent tables will serve you quite well.

The preference of one form of math over another can only be judged by the type of questions being answered. While I was doing measurement in an engineering fashion, Trig was an immensely useful tool. Not that I'm more into mundane aspects of business software, I find it less useful - though not totally useless.

The question should be (a) who finds life harder with Trig; and (b) who finds life easier with Trig. Personally, I think some topics should not be addressed by watering down complexity, but rather the complexity should be appreciated from first principles. If someone finds Trig hard, perhaps the problem is not in Trig, but in how the subject is taught. If you're going to be an Engineer of practically any sorts, then you'd be an idiot not to expose yourself to the rich history of triangles - no matter whether you think it easy to grok or not.

Anyhow, Trig is but one of the ways to express certain mathematical principles. It's long and useful history makes it likely it will survive and thrive. Not dismiss the alternatives, but they must not only show they are better, but that they are profoundly and pragmatically better on a very wide and far reaching basis. Like it to Programming Languages - under what circumstances would you adopt a new PL if you had hundreds of years invested in an immense library of proven code?