Any Value in Trading Moving Averages?

Moving Averages are one of the most basic technical analysis method of the financial market. They are basically the averages of the past prices, and when plotted on the chart, they can indicate the prevailing trend. If the closing price of the bar is above the Moving Average, the trend is up and vice versa if it is below.
Many systems and variations of them are used and tested. The one I found out to be favorable to me is that I do not place trades when the Moving Averages get crossed, nor would I place a trade if the closing price is on the other side of the bar. Rather, I found out that I like the system where the crossing bars highs and lows serve as an entrance point. I would place my trades few pips higher than the high of the bar that crossed the Moving Average from below and do just the opposite for the down cross. The other side of the price extreme would serve as a stop loss order.

However, the problem with any system exclusively based on Moving Averages is that it will go through long periods of losses. This is because markets can and do trade sideways, without a significant trend. And that can extend over a long period of time. So, just as well as a system based on them makes money in big trends as it captures all big moves, it can just as severely lose it all in a choppy market.

Yet for me they are not completely useless as many traders would make you think. Here is sincerely how I find it most useful:
-I use it as a base to measure how other systems stack against it. For me, my moving average system serves as a bench mark, meaning if the newly developed system that I back test can not handily beat the results of moving averages, then it is useless.
-It can be used as a decent filter for getting rid of a lot of average and small probability trades even when trading on fundamental data.
-Many systems can employ them successfully if they are combination with the other indicators (see this post on the trading system that combines Moving Averages and Stochastic).
When I first started to look into trading, before historical testing programs came out, I used it in spreadsheets, and played with them by building my systems inside. Now there are much easier ways to test them, but I think I learned a lot by crunching numbers inside worksheets.