And how beneficial is it to keep just for the excuse factor?

What are the chances that Democrats would capitalize on the opportunities getting rid of it would present, any more than they have capitalized on being in the majority since the start of the 2007 Congress?

I'm thinking, slim to none.  And not because I think the Dems are that inept and incompetent - even if there are elements of that - but because I'm not convinced they really hate the filibuster as much as the noise being generated about it would indicate.  

I think that even if you stripped away the worst of the procedural stumbling blocks, you'd still be left with a Senate more inclined to do the business of business than the business of the people.

The second point argued is that the filibuster is more harmful to progressive policy than to "conservative" policy. See Scott Lemieux and Kevin Drum. I think that is largely wrong. For the past 30 years, the essential progressive fight has been the preservation of progressive policy achievement. The filibuster has been very useful in this fight.

At least, according to Ben Eidelstein (whether he is an expert or not, I do not know, but the analysis is interesting).  From February of this year, Eidelstein writes (my emphasis in bold):

Because one of the most entrenched assumptions about the filibuster--that it thwarts majority rule--is only half-true. When you crunch the numbers, it turns out that the filibuster has often served to enforce majority rule in recent years, not to undermine it. Instead of abolishing the filibuster, we should try to curb its undemocratic excesses while preserving its role as a democratic check.

SNIP

To do this, I downloaded records of all Senate votes on cloture motions--used to limit debate--from 1991 to 2008. For each of the 152 votes where a filibuster successfully thwarted a Senate majority, I tallied the populations represented by the senators who supported the filibuster. (A more technical explanation--including some significant details I've glossed over--is available here.)

What do these calculations reveal? First, over the past two decades or so, the senators who successfully filibustered something represented about 46 percent of Americans on average. Yes, that is a minority--but it is a far cry from the nightmare scenarios sometimes deployed by opponents of the filibuster, who worry that as little as 11 percent or 12 percent of the country could obstruct popular legislation. Since 1991, in fact, there have been only four filibusters--0.03 percent of the total--that thwarted senators representing more than 65 percent of the American people.

What's most striking, though, are the many cases in which the filibustering Senate minority has actually represented a majority of Americans. In fact, in 40 percent of the filibusters since 1991, the senators making up the "obstructionist" minority represented more people than the majority they defeated.
The traditional debate over the filibuster--which equates filibustering with a minority veto, and then argues the merits of giving the minority such a prerogative--entirely misses this fact. Democratic filibusters against President Bush's judicial nominees were decried as undemocratic usurpations, for example. But nearly all of them fell into this category of "majority rule filibusters."

This example is typical of a more general partisan pattern. When Republicans have been in the majority, the filibustering minority has actually represented the majority of Americans 64 percent of the time. When Democrats have been in the majority, that figure plummets to 3 percent. So the charge that it is somehow hypocritical for Democrats to decry Republican filibusters as affronts to majority rule--if they also stand by their past decisions to filibuster the Republicans--is easily answered. When Democrats have filibustered Republicans in recent years, they have very often represented more Americans than the Republican majority; the same is almost never true in reverse.

All of this suggests that reformers should not be too quick to reject the filibuster outright as an impediment to democracy. During recent periods of Republican control, the filibuster has served as a democratic backstop that counteracts the structural inequality of the Senate--often empowering a majority of Americans, acting through their senators, to veto extremist bills or nominees.