CONFESSION: I'm a Photoshop Magic Wand whore.
I usually have Contiguous disabled.
I'm constantly pressing CTRL-H to hide (toggle) the ugly mask to the point where if I wasn't so lazy I would bind it to something else.
I also heavily use SHIFT and ALT click to add and remove entire colours (across the whole image) to the mask.
In my mind I've nick-named this technique Mask Painting.
It allows me to lazily create textures and rendering with large circle or square brushes without clobbering surrounding details.
The mask is hidden so I can see clearly the changes that are being made.
It always requires pixel-level cleanup but massively speeds up the process for me.