using live.slider outside of M4L

I was wondering if there is any reason that I shouldn't use live.slider in my standard (non-M4L) patch? I like the look and ease of use of the slider. Takes up less room and looks cleaner than a [slider] and quicker to implement than a pictslider, easier to customize with messages etc. I assume I can ignore all the M4L parameter stuff and the M4L automation settings. Is there a performance penalty for using this slider or some hidden problem that I'm not thinking of?

One other thing - I was intrigued by the enum output. I need my slider to select some values that I haven't been able to cleanly scale to either linearly or using some exponential function. So I just made a lookup table and step through the values. I like the idea of using enum to embed these values in the actual slider but, since I'm not using M4L and actually have no idea how it works, I'm not sure how I would get the enum values out of the slider in my non-M4L context. I can see the number if I set shownumber true, just don't know how to access it (the slider output just outputs the index of the enum list). Is this whole strategy a bad idea??

Thanks!