What is the point of c:out ?

I see a lot of people using things like

Or

What the hell is the point? Isn't it easier to just do:

or

??? Same effect, why the extra writing?

first: little point
second: that's the syntax before JSTL 1.1.
In JSTL 1.0 you could not embed EL directly in the code and have the output added to the output stream, it could only be used inside a tag.
As many servers don't support JSTL 1.1 (JSP 2.0) yet, and many people have gotten into the use to use c

ut, you'll continue to see it.
Myself I find the extra text using c

ut to add clarity, plus the project uses Tomcat 4.1 which doesn't support JSTL 1.1.

Just an example of the ultimate in using JSP tags...
Small JSP which is completely prepared for i18n, not a single word of static text on the page.

<%@ page errorPage="error.jsp" %><%@ taglib prefix="c" uri="http://java.sun.com/jstl/core" %><%@ taglib prefix="fmt" uri="http://java.sun.com/jstl/fmt" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<fmt:setBundle basename="nl.esa.controller.jsptext"/>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title><fmt:message key='screen.history.title'/>-<c:out value="${uid}"/></title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../opmaak.css" media="handheld"/>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../opmaak.css" media="screen"/>
</head>
<body>
<table>
<tr><td><fmt:message key='text.actId'/>:</td><td><c:out value="${act.id}"/></td></tr>
<tr><td><fmt:message key='text.location'/>:</td><td><c:out value="${act.adres}"/></td></tr>
</table>
<hr/>
<div>
<c:forEach items="${act.apparaat.history}" var="p" varStatus="status"><div><c:out value="${p.datum}"/> <c:out value="${p.oms}"/> <c:out value="${p.count}"/> <c:out value="${p.naam}"/></div></c:forEach>
</div><hr/></hr>
<span><input type="button" on_click="window.location.href='controller?page=werk&id=<c:out value="${act.atcKey}"/>';" value="<fmt:message key='button.prev'/>"/></span>
</body>
</html>

Also, <c

ut/> will, by default, escape special HTML characters to their HTML entitiy equivalents.