> if I update/delete something, I don't want it to "magically" cascade through the database.

This is the big reason I don't like triggers either. I would use them in only one case: if the database didn't support an auto-incrementing "identity" type, I might use a trigger to simulate that. But just as often I would prefer a stored procedure that got the new ID from a sequence, and then did the insert, especially if there were other things I needed a stored procedure to deal with.