Yes, I do run with scopes up (just like I have the histogram up all the time in Photoshop).
What I normally run is Waveform RGB. I've played with all the others at least a bit, but so far this is the one that's actually useful.
I haven't yet figured out anything useful I can learn from the vectorscope; this seems to be leftover from the days of analog video, I was dealing with the edges of this long ago back in college (mostly film, not very sophisticated video tools, but I remember seeing calibration signal generators and such).
(Oh, and on the general question of "by the numbers", Dan Margulis and his book Professional Photoshop are pretty much the bible on color correction to pre-press people. I don't push things nearly as far as he does, but he's arguably the primary exponent of the "by the numbers" approaches.)