As always, this thread has degraded into a quest for absolutes.
Professional chefs always this...
Calphalon is always that...
You want to see what professional chefs use, go look in a restaurant kitchen or spend some time in a restaurant supply house. Most professional cookware is aluminum, the vast majority of it, mainly because it's CHEAP and conducts heat well. Professional chefs aren't into buying the best and taking care of it, they buy on the cheap because they constantly destroy and replace their cookware and cutlery. There are some chefs that use their own fine knives, but I've yet to meet a chef who carries his/her own cookware.
Go look in a restaurant kitchen, most of the pans will be dented, bent, rubber handles burnt and scorched, bottoms of pans will be black with soot, most of the non-stick surfaces will be seriously scratched if not worn off all together. Most restaurant chefs I know use enough butter and oil that sticking is seldom a problem anyway.
Aluminum is not bad at all, It's not the prettiest thing to look at, and it sure is cheap and a good conductor. I use several restaurant supply pieces in my home kitchen. Would I like to have all All-clad? Sure, but I'd rather buy 1-2 all-clad pans and spend spend the extra money on a good set of knives or a kitchenaid mixer.
Pure aluminum is not as durable as steel, that's why All-clad sandwiches alum. between 2 layers of steel. Anodized aluminum (calphalon, Anolon, Circulon, etc.) is a harder form of aluminum, and it's pure aluminum.
The only cooking drawback to pure aluminum is that is will color acidic foods over time, tomato sauce, vinegary sauces, they react with the aluminum and marinara can become brown.
There need not be a debate about non-stick. Sometimes you want non-stick, sometimes you want a polished smooth metal surface. Take sauteing, I have an all-clad 11" stainless saute pan with a lid that I use to saute meats. It's presently the only all-clad pan that I own. I bought it for $79 in a Marshalls and felt guilty for weeks. This is one case where you want stickiness because the stuck-on bits (called "fond" by the french) can be picked up off of the pan by a liquid through a process called deglazing and make a damn flavorful sauce. There is no way to do this on a non-stick pan, it's just too slippery. On the other hand, you haven't experienced frustration until you've tried to scramble eggs without butter in a steel pan, non-stick makes it so much easier. Clearly, non-stick pans carry a health benefit as well, you're far less apt to use a lot of oil with them.
Saute and frypans are the only pans where it really matters. People who buy the All-clad saucepans to cook soup and boil water really could have done with a far lesser pan. They heat and distribute heat better, but when boiling water and other cooking liquids, it has a negligible impact. But I realize that these pans are damn pretty and look nicer when every pan on your rack is the same style and material.
Mine is not, and never will be. Mine looks like a hodgepodge.
I've said time and again, I don't believe in sets. There's nothing wrong with them, but they're only a bargain if you need and would use EVERY single pan and lid in the set. And I've yet to find a set where every pan was useful to me, there's always an ugly-cousin pan that never gets used.
Oh, and that person who wanted to put their pan in a 500 degree oven, that's not what they're designed to do. You want to do that, get a $10 cast iron, it'll do the duty, and many other things.
