What are the benefits of ENS?

Is the purpose of ENS purely to make a more user friendly wallet address system? I like the idea but am hesitant sinking anything substantial in gas if there isn't a huge upside or lots of future usage. But if that is going to become the norm I may as well pick an applicable one up now before they are unavailable/too expensive. Also, are <7 letter names available now? I keep reading only 7+ letter names are available but the articles that reference that are from 2018 and just saw Budweiser got beer.eth so I assume that has changed.