Indeed. People who only know how to traverse a directory using recursion will suffer grief if they are asked to do it breadth-first instead. Recursion gives you an implicit stack. If you can unwind it to get an explicit stack instead, then switching between depth-first and breadth-first is as simple as switching from a stack to a queue.

But, one step at a time. Recursion is a great technique for thinking through a problem that you don't know how solve up front. Once you understand that solution, you can start trying to think of other approaches with other trade-offs. :-)