Everyone has their own preferences. Personally, I hate having to use disposable batteries to keep something running, and I find winding a to be a nice, enjoyable thing to do while having my morning coffee. And, if it’s an automatic, a mechanical watch only needs winding when you first start it up, as long as you wear it every day.

Oh, and jewels as in “jeweled bearings” is more about durability and efficiency than expensive materials. Jeweled bearings, often referred to as just “jewels”, are made from synthetic ruby, but they’re incredibly cheap, pennies each. Instead of having metal on metal surfaces which wear on each other and create power wasting friction, you have a polished metal on polished ruby surface, with a tiny bit of lubricant that clings to the bearing due to its shape and surface tension, which provides a very low friction, very durable surfaces for support of rotating elements, like the posts the hands are mounted on, or arbors that support all the various gears in mechanical watches. Lots of better quality quartz watches use at least a handful of jewels for exactly the same reason. Lower drag on moving components and better durability is good whether the oscillator is quartz of mechanical. Since quartz watches have fewer, and lower mass, moving parts, thet can often get away with omitting jeweled bearings, but many quartz movements, even fairly low cost ones, will have a few jeweled bearings.