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Thoughts I have pertain only to alkyd materials, not who uses them. I have known a number of artists with national reputations whose work is superlative, whose materials choices and application methods I sometimes find worrisome from my own experience. It's tough to abuse either to the point of failure in a very short time, however, and after all, it's what the work looks like that interests the patron, not how, or with what.
Alkyd resin is a synthetic material derived from the combination of an acid and alcohol. The initial nomenclature reflected this, "al-cid" and later became "alkyd". The discovery was first applied to automotive utility coatings in the mid-1930's (DuPont's DuLux). Fast drying, tougher than nitrocellulose lacquer used well into the 1950's, it remains a staple for commercial and utility applications.
Used to advantage in oil painting where the work is completed wet-in-wet in one sitting, it should pose no particular problems. An alkyd medium mixed in colors, then subsequently over-painted stands a possibility of de-laminating. The addition of drying oils to alkyd vehicles makes fresh applications painted over dry films especially prone to separation unless the dry layer is abraded to provide a mechanical "key" for bonding (i.e., "sand between coats"). This is because surface-dry layers of alkyd paints do not fuse with fresh paint through solvent transfers and resulting chemical bonds as natural resins permit.
Again, why "mess" with a system that (with all its possibilities and complexities) has worked for 500 years? It will require another 100 years to find out if alkyds are better or worse than anything that has been used in previous centuries.
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