[B.Johnston]

Yes, the most significant advantage of this encoder is its free rotating shaft.

Plus it costs about the same as a 10 turn precision pot without the potential for value shifting due to vibration or temperature.

One possible reason to use raw quadrature input is to "count" beyond 1 revolution.

The source of this encoder USDigital has several other devices which can emulate pots by actively providing an analog voltage "incremented or decremented" by a quadrature pulse train (edac2) or an analog voltage feedback of the rate of pulses per second(etach2).

Additionally these devices incorporate the ability to self calibrate via a precise index marker pulse.

By selecting your counts per revolution carefully you can tailor the precision of the output to the neccessary resolution.