I think that it depends on the goal of the student. If the student only wants to speak, he can maybe limit his study to pinyin only. Those who want to be able to write and read should always learn the characters. For a beginner in chinese language, learning both pinyin and characters takes more time, but i think it’s worth it. In the long term, knowing characters can help learning, because very often, you can guess the meaning only by looking to the character. As soon as i know the pronunciation of a character, i avoid looking to the pinyin. In this way, i force myself to read and remember characters.

I think most people are a "one-legged" student of chinese. There are some reasons for this which also apply to my situation. 1) Most probably want to be able to speak and listen, but do not need to read or write - just chat with friends or have a better vacation experience. 2) Writing characters is difficult on western computers because even though the characters are available in the computer they are not easy to access or set-up. 3) As soon as a westerner learns that most chinese nationals know pinyin ok then the naturally "lazy" approach is to think "that will be enough". Chinese characters are very beautiful but to a foreigners eyes it can all seem too complex - native speakers of European languages particularly are used to words represented by simple letters in arrangement not a single character - put simply our brains are used to handling written language differently. I personally like to learn characters but since I am learning many languages I have to prioritise!

you know that I study both pinyin and characters!

wo zai riben zhuguo, suoyi you yidianr zhidao hanzi. but i don't know how to write them on my computer, so i use pinyin.

不會吧，所有我以前的同學都嫩看懂漢字，其實你說的那種人我一個也不認識。