DH

When it mattered?
To win.
In times of peace, when they had a bunch of bored and potentially dangerous Samurai, they came up with the idea of having them become men of letters, warrior /scholars. You can also trace many of the effective arts starting to falter during that time.

You can trust that people like nice people more than effective fighters. And like effective fighters who are nice people even more. But one has nothing to do with the other.
The notion that any type of budo makes nice people is as bogus as budo making good fighters. There is more fantasy surrounding budo than many other activities I have seen adults involved in. There are so many polished, very nice, poetic, examplary budo people who are about as combatively effective as a pissed off soccer mom. I will leave you to decide which floats your boat. I'm bettin most will take the well spoken, poetic, teacher with great stories, over an effective fighter any day of the week, and most wouldn't know the difference anyway. After all, effective in a dojo doesn't really mean much.
Effective, is a very relative word. It really doesn't take much to be "effective" with your average budo person of any type, you'de have to go to the combative sports guys and *some* of the IP guys for a more substantial version of what is effective. And they're very nice to boot!!

Dan