I guess it all depends on your own preferences and traditions.  Since I'm not a sysadmin type of person, I tend to steer clear of any location that is not somewhere under ```/home``` (for both data and code).  

I try to do as much as possible in user-space because I feel that vendors and sysadmins typically treat user-space as sacred -- it usually gets allocated lots of space and is frequently backed up.

But maybe that's just because I'm used to working in environments where human beings are the primary users of the machine.  In other types of environments, the priorities may be different.