It is not a question of having lots and lots of gears, it is a question of having the right gears and being able to find them when you want them.
I use a triple (52/42/24) and eight speed SRAM (11/12/14/16/18/21/26/32) rear. To avoid premature wear, I don't use the smallest two rear sprockets with the smallest chainring, don't use the largest two rear sprockets with the largest chainring and don't use the innermost and outer most two rear sprockets with the middle chainring. That gives me a total of 18 gears that I actually use.
The 52 and 42 are one and a half step gearing, so when I want to shift from one gear to the next, it is easily predictable on how to get there, upshifting the front and down shifting the rear (or vice versa) is a frequent shift for me when the slope of the road changes a slight bit.
In the important range of 60 to 90 gear inches where I spend the vast majority of my time, my gears are spaced pretty close to each other. The gears are spaced farther apart where I am on the shallow long downhills in my highest gears. They are also spaced farther apart on my granny (24t) chainring for climbing the steep hills. But, I spend very little time in the higher and lower gears, so I can live without more gear selection in those areas. And you can see I have no redundant gears where two or more gears are identical to each other.
I would not mind having a few more evenly spaced gears in the 40 to 60 gear inch range for long shallow uphills, but it is not worth buying a lot of new equipment to obtain the additional gears. I have considered changing the front 52t to a 45t for half step gearing, that would give me one more gear in the 50 something range and I would loose the highest gear, I might still do that some day. Plot is attached.
The upshift from the 24 to 42 is not a smooth shift but it eventually works, I use a friction front shifter (bar end).
The gear inch calculations are based on the actual diameter of my 700cX37mm tires.
If you are wondering if I actually spent the time to program a spreadsheet so I could calculate and plot gearing on a chart, yes I did because I wanted to make sure that I got the gearing that I wanted when I built up my 700c touring bike about six years ago. I was happy enough with this mix of components that I used the same mix again a few months ago when I built up an expedition touring bike with 26 inch wheels.