the failed product and business's grave yard is full of failed ventures by s&p 500 company's . if you don't trust the mgmt of a company to act responsible perhaps you should not own the stock regardless .
i don't need them to give me back my own money . i can sell any stock and take a bit out if i wanted .
most folks reinvest the dividends back in the same company anyway .
My point is that a dividend is a great signal that they are acting responsibly. Many large companies have great core businesses that are much, much better than the average business. Many of those businesses can't deploy unlimited capital into those great businesses though. Rather than have them expand into poor businesses, I'd rather just have them deploy the capital that they can into the great businesses, and send me back the remainder.
Take Coke. For a long time in the 70s and early 80s, they took the profits from a great business and invested them in a whole slew of marginal businesses (shrimp farming was actually one of them). The overall return of the business was lackluster. I'd rather they just keep selling Coke, re-invest as much as makes sense into that business, and send me the excess in dividends or stock buybacks (when the stock is reasonably priced).
I can find other places to put the money. I'd rather own great businesses than the hodgepodge of junk that most companies end up with when they decide they can deploy the capital into other businesses with as much success as they have had in their core business.
Berkshire is the exception that proves the rule here for me. I trust Buffet to redeploy capital intelligently. That's what he is good at.
The managers of Coke, McDonald's, Microsoft, Fastenal, ADP, Walmart, Exxon, ect, are good at running their core businesses. They aren't always going to be good at deploying capital outside that circle of competence though. They also have an incentive to overpay for purchased businesses, because as a rule, the bigger the business gets (regardless of the return on capital), the more they are likely to get paid. So if management is good enough to say "keeping this capital will not get the same return on investment in our great business that the existing capital gets, our shareholders should find other great places to invest this money rather than have us deploy it sub-optimally", I take that as a really good trait in management.