I use sand in my small 10 gallon with my baby gold spilo. I like it a lot. Like you said, it's a lot more natural looking (except for the fact that I use blue sand). It's also a lot easier to clean the tank bottom since all the poop and fish remains stay right on top of it. Only bad thing is that when you're putting in new water (depending on how you do it) if you disturb the sand, air bubbles will form in it and you'll have big sand coated air bubbles floating around. Nasty looking and hard to clean out. Also you can't use undergravel filtration as far as I can tell, but I just use a power filter. Sand will</A> get in it if you're not careful about how you pour in your water or houw you pour in your sand. Not big deal, once a month I just wash my filter out and it works good as new.