point?
bbl sleep
well, decide on your own... 
My take is that a healthy athlete should be able to squat deep and sit in a deep squat comfortably. It's not only about strength/power but also about mobility, flexibility, balance and coordination...
i think we need to define "athlete" here.. are we talking about an olympic lifter athlete or a basketball/football/etc athlete? because, for the latter, "balance + coordination + knee stability" is going to be best obtained through reactive/dynamic movements specific to their sport, squatting (any form) doesn't even come close.
As for flexibility, that level of flexibility isn't even needed for most sports. Having too much flexibility can be a bad thing, that's a really hard issue to discuss because it's so individual-specific. If I use myself as an example, too much flexibility/mobility work makes me perform worse -> when i'm "tight", I descend into my plants and just rocket right out, I can feel the tension.. if i'm "too flexible" due to too much stretching/mobility work, I feel like mush and I feel some "collapsing" going on in the plant. The same issue applies to my explosive bball dribbling, sprinting, etc.. If I stretch my quads, I perform worse.
One of the major issues with deep squatting is meniscus issues, regardless of any of the benefits you mentioned, meniscus issues are a real concern. That "shock absorbing tissue" is stress intensively during reactive/explosive/sport movements, taxing it further and in such "extreme joint roms under tension" doesn't sound like the smartest thing to me if you're a non oly lifter... If you're an oly lifter, then it's very smart, you'd want to get strong at those roms because it's specific to your sport, not doing so would increase injury risk.
I can't think of many sports where deep mobility is necessary or beneficial.. Plenty (i'd say a majority) of the most powerful athletes on earth don't have the mobility to squat ATG properly. It's rare when you find someone who is freaky-powerful with leverages beneficial to RVJ/sprint/etc that has perfect ATG squat form/mobility, extremely rare. I worked with over 30 NFL combine athletes one year and the vast majority of them were tight. Out of the two most powerful athletes, 4.39 40 vs 4.31 40, one was insanely tight, one was insanely flexible. Both had a shitload of muscle and were so strong it was ridiculous. One could ATG squat perfect (being 5'6), the other could only hit half with good form (being 6'1 or so).
Bottom line, individual differences highly influence whether or not someone should be going deep or not, so making a blanket statement about squat depth doesn't take into account those individual differences. For the vast majority of athletes interested in VJ/sprinting, going deep is very unnecessary because those athletes, who are naturally drawn to these performance events, have more ability to progress with half squatting due to leverages/mechanical advantage at those joint angles.
Beyond any of that, half squatting (slightly above parallel, NOT PARALLEL) is 100x more specific to vert/power based athletic movements than is deep squatting.
pc
