Personally, I prefer using paredit because it feels more predictable since you're telling it what to do explicitly. That said, I've heard from a lot of beginners that parinfer helped them get started with Clojure. Even if it's not optimal, I think there's a lot of value in the fact that it's easy to get started with.
I've never been a fan of paredit, but paredit, smartparens, and lispy are all far more powerful and (for me as well) more intuitive. I agree that parinfer deserves credit for being widely available for different text editors and for being fairly easy to pick up. I do think that the method is unnecessarily complicated though. When "paren mode" was still necessary, I think it was a much poorer choice for a newcomer than it is now.
