I gave up composting in a pile for various reasons, but primarily because life's too short to irritate a back injury and to get sweaty and eaten by mosquitoes over something unnecessary.
The last pile I built was completely full of 17 million ants who I guess ate most of it, probably aided by worms. It took a LOT of sweat and effort to pile so much stuff up, many hours of work, even stuff from other people's yards. It was 6 feet high, about 8 feet long, 4-5 feet wide when I stopped adding stuff to it in late fall. About 3 months later, there was hardly anything left, it took about 20 minutes to distribute a few buckets of stuff to beds. I was only able to get that from it because I'd built the pile on a few sheets of old roof metal. No way that was as worthwhile or yielded as much benefit as putting that stuff directly on beds. Everything the worms did there was for naught in terms of garden beds - 20 feet from the nearest one.
Then you have to decide when it's 'done' and move all that crap - again, and what to do with all of the OM that comes along while the pile is 'finishing?' Another pile of course. I still use all of the OM from our yard (except some bones, meat kitchen scraps, thorns) but I only move it once. I have the softest, blackest, most well-drained-yet-takes-forever-to-dry-out 'dirt' you could fantasize!
I don't need to buy mulch anymore, as long as I make use of all of the OM our yard and kitchen generates. If there's no logical/scientific reason for doing a thing, it's just busywork that doesn't need to be done. I'm not concerned about killing any kind of seeds because I don't wait until weeds have seeds to pull them. They are left to bake in place, where pulled.
