This is just me asking you guys what you think about Scenes… Are they really necessary?
Do they have other uses or are they no different from just loading a level externally?
Just your thoughts is what I want thanks
I think they are very important, I use libloading to load levels, so I don’t use scenes for that. Mainly I use scenes for make the HUD of my games.
Making the hud in a overlay scene is better than just putting the healt bars and messages over the camera of the main scene:
-You can edit the hud easily.
-You can use an ortographic camera, without changing the perspective of the game main camera.
-It fix the delay of one frame that parenting have. (If you put the hud in the main scene, then I think you must parent it to the camera, then when you move the camera, the hud will move delayed)
I also have used scenes to do the pause menu, but you can do it in the same scene of the hud, just have two cameras in the hud menu and change the active camera.
They are useful, but only if you need overlays or underlays, or need complex GUI’s. One project I’m working on at the moment has three background scenes running various simulations and one scene that combines them all together using render-to-texture.
But for levels or large datasets loading from an external file (eg static linking or libload) is the way to do it.
As @carlo697 mentioned, they are very useful, and help you to organise your game project.
It allows you to keep elements such as menus and HUD’s etc all separate from the main game.
So basically, seconding everything carlo697 mentioned above 
One thing I can’t quite understand is, why I can’t have objects with the same name in separate scenes.
Or do all objects exist in the same namespace somewhere?
They share namespace in blender’s datablock system.
I see thanks guys for your thoughts I also had used the scenes for overlays with Healthbars and so on but have not bothered with healthbars since a long time.
Again thanks
You do not need to use scenes for “levels”, but you could.
You can use scenes to create independent 3D-scenes, that can be rendered one over the other (good for HUDs or Background).
You can use scenes for different purposes, e.g. scenes for game world, scenes for menus, scenes for status information.
Scenes can be a great help to organize your assets.
Scenes can be linked from other blend files.