tilemaker really is fantastic. I make regular use of it (and tippecanoe) to slice and dice tilesets and it works well and is fast. it feels like it's right on the cusp of being an easyish way of generating vector tiles for the whole planet at a cost below $100. I can't wait for it to get there!
I've found that for about any situation where I need to display more than a couple hundred features on a map, vector tiles are superior to geojson/polyline parsing/geobuf: they're parsed very fast and tippecanoe has compression, simplification, feature removal (for low zooms), and tile size limiting features
In my case I use it to display roads that a person has walked/biked, so you can easily accumulate thousands of items to display.
