For decorative prints I think cura is great option, I'm not convinced it's got quite enough control to be as good at mechanical prints as slic3r can be.

I think it might be fair to say not all features are available in any single offering. It'd be nice if there were one program that does everything, but until one comes along, we're kinda stuck with learning a variety of programs and using the one that does what we need to do when we need to do it.

Cura is crazy fast at slicing compared to anything else available. The only thing I find somewhat annoying is it doesn't wait until you finish telling it what to do before it goes to work. It's a minor annoyance at worst. It has a lot of options available for adjusting the trade offs between print quality vs. speed, I have some models which require detecting open spaces to span, which Cura seems to do especially well with.

I can't think of anything one might do with it that would result in harm, other than the usual waste of plastic used in experimenting with unfamiliar programs. If you're used to something else, the differences may bug you a little bit, but otherwise, it's farily intuititive and user friendly. IMO, the thing to like most about Cura is how fast it slices. It does in seconds what takes some programs minutes. About the only "tip" I can think of is the default overlap in the expert settings is 15%. I think you get better layer adhesion by increasing that to 40-50%, but that may be because most of the models I've worked with I needed to print with 100% fill.