I also use my own fields to create addressing/locations. My reasoning is that I rarely need anything bigger than city, and so city is 98% of the time going to be "salem" so, I really then capture a street location which gets me down to 2 fields. 

I do not like having to force the user to fill in country every submission!

In the data you can easily concatenate the location data attributes to make a mailing address or such as necessary.

I have never use the built in Address piece, it is cumbersome and doesn't do well with what you may want to do with the data after the fact.  I think I saw Laserfiche mention its something they plan to improve but @Suzanne Wels, you are better creating your own fields and using the variables from the State field you create.