It's because Emacs is one of the few editors where you can actually manage 90 and more buffers -- thanks to the fact that you can refer to them by name.
Exactly. To switch to a different buffer I don't pick it from a list, I just enter its name. Actually, thanks to iswitch, I only start typing a few characters that are unique to the buffer name. It's an incredably fast way of flicking between different buffers and it scales very well to a large number of files.
Also, hippie-expand will expand to stuff contained in open buffers.