I think the answer of  "Is incremental forever the best way to backup?"
depends on your companies environment. ADSM is designed  so it can scale to
multi-terabytes of data being backed up from multitudes of client platforms
that can be spread over many locations and do this across what is in most
shops very limited and expensive network resources.  If you have very
little data and all systems to be backed up run on the same platform and
you have unlimited network resources and you do not expect this to ever
change,  then there may be better ways for you to backup.

In our environment we could not even consider moving all our data across
the network on a regular basis. If we tried then we would end up with no
backup at all. Yes I think ADSM has many short comings, but it is the most
robust and industrial strength solution available today. ADSM is the system
that gives me the most sleep at night!