When Do You Use the Captivate Skin for Navigation or to Create Your Own Navigation

Just my personal opinion, others can have a different view. I never use a default playbar (except sometimes in developing stage) for these reasons:

• Because I mostly have branching in projects, they are not linear. That means that the behavior of the progress bar is very confusing to learners.
• The Next/Back buttons on the playbar override any custom navigation which you have when using branching, remediation, conditional actions. With custtom buttons you can have custom navigation.
• I often have On Enter actions for slides (for resetting or preparing situations on revisit); when a learner uses the progress bar in a playbar to end up in a random frame, those On Enter actions often will be skipped and that leads to strange situations.
• If you have attached scores to interactive objects and the learner prefers using only the buttons on the playbar, he may miss scoring and results will be falsified.
• Custom buttons can have a better design by editing the InBuilt states and adding custom states (lToggle buttons).

Conclusion: use the default playbar only for simple, linear, PPT-like projects. If you want to add quick navigation, using a TOC with navigation turned on is a better choice IMO.