Quote - That isn't quite true, because the cloth will still follow whatever it collides with in a "realistic" way.   Say you have a dress on a character in frame 1,  and in frame 30, you have moved the character forward 10 feet.  The simulation is set to have the dress collide with all body parts of the figure.  Without parenting, if the dress fits character , the dress will "blow in the wind" in a fairly realistic way as the character moves forward. 

I don't really see any benefit in leaving a cloth item parented to a figure, except maybe just to set the scene up at frame 1 and then un-parent it.  It's OK if the dress does not follow the character around before running the simulation, that's the point of running the dynamic cloth sim.

 

OTOH, I've had better success --especially with tight-fitting dynamic clothing-- when keeping the clothing prop parented to the hip so for each given animation frame, the parented cloth starts in a position which is closer to the figure and the relevant collision body parts.  That is, I've had animations fail when the figure or body part moves too far relative to the current position of the dynamic cloth.  Great for those times you want a superhero to literally run out of their civvies, but...

if I have a figure leap forward, I've found I'm less likely to have the character burst out of their clothes (or some part of it, like a sleeve) if the clothes are parented so they leap forward with the figure.

So my view is that parenting is the better default since I don't see any reason NOT to parent, though I'll concede there may be benefits I haven't noticed or appreciated.