Its not an issue Barry, its a matter of time management. Unless you have few contacts in order to get to that name in the first place using contacts takes longer than using the dialpad and the more contacts you have the longer it takes. Few contacts isn't the way it tends to work out for most people with a smartphone however. Once you figure out Uncle Google never forgets your phone numbers and the phone can quickly and easily search to any of them you start loading them on your phone. The Chinese take out place down the road, got it, the veterinarian, on the phone, everyone I interact with on more than a singular basis, on my phone. For me this is more than 700 contacts thanks to a sync with (some) work phone numbers. There are people who have thousands if they have their phones syncing with work contact lists. Once you start putting the smart into your phone getting to a phone number quickly means you need something more robust than scrolling through a contact list. This is the beauty of a dialer that prioritizes your search by times contacted. I have a passel of work numbers but most of them I don't call at all, they're just there in case I need them. The remainder can be further divided into those I seldom call and those I call with real frequency. By using an intelligent search result that sorts the contacts by relevance I have in effect removed seldom or in some cases never called numbers from my search making the contacts list smaller.
In the end Barry if you don't have a lot of contacts using the contact app is fine. If you do its the slowest possible way of getting from point A to B that I'm aware of.