Am I missing out on some sort of functionality by not using vertex face at all in Maya? I don't see what the purpose of blowing out every face is. I would say it's easier to see different faces but, in my opinion, it just makes it worse. I've just been looking at it on the flick menu's for the past few months every time I go to change selection modes and the question has been growing on me. Is it just novel way to look at an object, or am I really missing something?

It allows you to select split vertex separately, like selecting independent vertex normals, or UVs in the 3D view, can also be used to apply different vertex colours to one vertex (but there are usually easier ways to go about this)... I never use it.

It's necessary for certain normal-editing operations, like Bal said... however, there is pretty much no practical use for it in 99% of any situations you're ever likely to be in.

I think I've had to use that mode literally once in the past 4 years of using Maya every day.

It also lets you check if you have accidentally created faces with no surface area (e.g. extruding and not applying any offset) they show up as a line in vertex face mode. Although you can fix this with the cleanup tools or merge verts without having to actually see it. So another semi-useful use :P.

Ah, well that explains it. Thanks for the explaination.

I have used it for things like vertex lighting/coloring.

http://blog.environmentartist.com/?p=205

Warheart is right. It's good for pointing things out if you don't want to do a cleanup.

I use vertex face when i want to paint the vertex with different color ;)