> Yet people seem to complain loudly about buybacks while treating dividends as "yeah, of course companies have to provide financial returns to shareholders... Otherwise, there would be no shareholders."

I'm one of those people!

Fundamentally, to me the difference is quite large. If I believe in a company, I don't want to sell my shares, rather I'd like a steady stream of income from their operations. Granted, it ends up being more tax efficient to use buybacks, but I think that's a flaw in our current model rather than a reason to prefer buybacks.

I understand that viewpoint (and agree with it way more than not). My governing beliefs are similar to "I'd like to invest in companies with strong leadership. Strong leadership tends to be rational. All else being equal, rational leadership tends to do things that are optimal under the taxation scheme in place. Therefore, strong leadership is somewhat more likely to be using share buybacks rather than dividends. Therefore, I'm happy/willing to invest in companies doing buybacks."

If you want to allow something like 1031 exchange for dividends or let investors decide when to withdraw dividends from their investment account and only tax them on withdrawal, you can fix the tax difference, at which point rational leadership would be more likely to pay dividends, which I think would be more transparent for all and better [at least no worse] for long-term investors.