Grass grows copiously under my pine trees, and they are 100 times messier than my maple trees. Dealing with maple leaves in the fall is far easier than dealing with everything that falls from white pines year round. There are efficient tools and methods for getting rid of leaves, but not pine cones and pine needles.
I can state with certainty that pine trees create an ENORMOUS amount of hard physical labor for the home owner. Over the past 12 months I have picked up and disposed of thousands upon thousands of pine cones because it was the height of the 3-5 year cone cycle. Some cones can be raked. Others need to be picked up by hand or with a grabber one. cone. at. a. time. Due to the frequent windstorms, the cones blew a couple hundred feet into sections of the yard that don't even have pine trees. Ditto for the needles. The needles are very difficult to rake properly, sometimes requiring a garden rake, not leaf rake, to get down deep and loosen them. Next come the dead and live branches that fall on the lawn, from tiny sticks to branches 10 inches in diameter. Again, hundreds of them each year. They need to be picked up, sawed to disposable length and carted off to the dump or placed on your own property. Finally, two fallen pines in the last 6 months that had to be removed, one of them costing $2500 and that was a bargain in my area.
You have to clean up all this debris in the spring before you can mow. This year there was so much debris on the lawn from the pine trees that it was impossible to clean it all up before the grass grew. Now I have 10" tall grass, which greatly increases the danger of exposure to TICKS. It's not fun searching for branches in tall grass, wearing long pants and a long-sleeved shirt while lathered up in deet when it's 85 degrees. Due to the tall grass I destroyed my lawn mower a couple of years ago when I ran over a small tree stump I didn't see.
I could easily clean up debris from these trees every day of the week and make three trips a week to the dump. Since I'm a working person, all this physical labor costs me a lot of money away from my paid work, exhaustion, and stress on the body, leaving little time for leisure activities I'd rather be doing. It's easy to love pines in a forest. They are beautiful, but I no longer romanticize about them in a yard. If the physical labor doesn't deter you, the danger of them falling on your house really should. In my heavily pine-forested state, after storms with heavy wet snow or severe wind storms, you're MUCH more likely to see fallen pines than deciduous trees.
