Why Have a Buyer's Agent?

I see this question often in online forums by people who are planning to buy a home and want to know why they should have a buyer's agent when the seller has an agent who can just take care of everything.  

Long before I was an agent, we bought a home with no agents involved on either side.  It went well enough, though now that I know more, there are things I wish we'd done at the time. 

When we bought our ranch, there were agents involved on both sides.  Even though I'd been through the process before and THOUGHT I knew all about how it worked, I was VERY glad to have our buyer's agent (a new concept at the time) to help us through all the details involved in buying rural property. 

Years later, I'm an agent, and having seen the things that CAN go wrong and in many cases WILL go wrong, I realize how extraordinarily lucky we were with that first purchase.  A deal can go absolutely smoothly, or it can implode totally out of the blue somewhere in the deal anywhere between contract and closing (sometimes at the closing table, even!).  Your buyer's agent, besides saving you a lot of time and dealing with the hassle that's involved in even the smoothest deal, besides providing you with the information that you need to make the best deal and the best informed decision you can, besides helping you navigate the maze that is house buying, is extremely valuable when that happens because they may have dealt with this kind of problem before, sometimes more than once, and if not, someone in their office will have, and many times because of that the problem can be resolved with minimal disruption and angst. 

Then, there's also the fact that if the other side has professional representation of their interests, why wouldn't you want to have representation of your interests, as well?  As a former legal assistant, I see it as sort of like going up against someone in court, where they have legal counsel and you don't.  It's entirely legal for you to represent yourself in court, but if you're not very experienced in court and the law, is it the smart thing to do?