I'd say that this depends very much on the problem. There are problems that are more elegantly and intuitively solved recursively without necessarily ascending

I'd say that this depends very much on the problem. There are problems that are more elegantly and intuitively solved recursively without necessarily ascending very far on the, e.g. parsers for nested-but-not-terribly-so data, say some applications of S-expressions or a protocol like DHCPv6, or traversal of tree structures known not to be tall.