Does the bowline matter?

The bowline, is it losing its grip? The knot is tied to the past, but is it now past its time? Yacht Racing Performance Coach Stuart Greenfield ponders the relevance of the bowline:

I learned the bowline before I learned the reef knot. Most of us did. It is the first knot a sailing instructor puts in your hands because it does the one thing a rope user needs more than any other, which is to make a fixed loop that holds under load and shakes free the moment you want it too.

Forty-seven years later I still tie it a hundred times a season without thinking, and that unthinking familiarity is worth interrogating, because the rope running through my hands today is not the rope the knot was designed for. The question I want to put down here is simple and slightly uncomfortable. Is the king of knots still the right answer, or have we kept a medieval solution alive out of habit while the material underneath it changed completely? – Full report