<p>Apparently, they're "confusing". Is that seriously the reason? Can you think of any others?</p>

Have you seen how many developers don't really understand ref/out?
I use them where they're really necessary, but not otherwise. They're usually only useful if you want to effectively return two or more values - in which case it's worth at least
thinking
about whether there's a way of making the method only do one thing instead. Sometimes using ref/out
is
the most appropriate approach - the various TryParse methods etc.