Ballpoint pens suck but they have this one gigantic advantage: they will write on almost any paper, no matter how crappy the paper is, and the line won't bleed. I'd like to be able to use the cheapest possible paper; there's a dollar store a block away and they have notebooks and things that are perfectly serviceable but printed on low-quality paper, the sort that will provoke immediate bleeding from a fountain pen or roller-ball type pens, so I've been using ballpoint pens even though they suck to write with.
There's a line from the 2008 movie Doubt where the hard-nosed Catholic school principal, Sister Aloysius (played by Meryl Streep), is complaining about the kids using ballpoints because they have to press down hard when writing with them and it spoils their handwriting. She's not exactly wrong, even though our penmanship is wretched (certainly not up to Sister Aloysius standards) and so we might as well scrawl it out with a ballpoint.
All the same, I really wish there were some pen out there that required less pressure to write with but which can make a clean line on bad paper. The only other thing I've found suitable for this purpose is writing with mechanical pencils—which I've done, but sometimes I really would prefer to use a pen.
