I mostly use just the central focus point... all the other are just used to confirm focus on ladnscapes.
How do you use off-center AF points to 'confirm focus' on landscapes? The only thing that comes to mind is when you shoot in automatic AF selection mode so every AF point on the plane lights up. Else, the AF system will just use whichever point is selected, and the other points are inactive.
Is your primary subject dead-center in all your shots? To me, that would make for boring, monotonous, and poorly composed shots. If I wanted that special Bob-the-American-tourist snapshot look, I'd just use a point-and-shoot with a fixed AF box right in the center. On the other hand, if you want to compose a shot with an off-center subject and you're shooting with a fast lens wide open (e.g. 85mm f/1.2), focus/recompose will get you a blurry shot every time - thus the need for off-center AF points, and frankly, on the 5DII those just aren't adequate in terms of performance.
Strange as it may seem, people took good photos of all sorts of things before the viewfinder was full of autofocus points - heck, how many auto-focus points do you think Ansel Adams had? Photographers that are children of the Internet revolution are such babies.
I, too, started with an SLR in the manual focus era. Just because I
can manually focus, doesn't mean I want to all the time, especially with the microetching on standard focus screens that improves brightness at the cost of masking the true DoF for fast lenses.
Heck, we could walk to work through the snow every day all winter, too. Commuters that are children of the automotive age are such babies...
