Having used Bison as well has my own hand-written compilers, I personally would suggest that Bison is not worth it. With recursive descent, you end up writing the same BNF structure anyways, but you don't have to fight the Bison file structure just to decorate the tree and you can much more easily work around syntax errors.

Whether one uses a parser generator's output as part of a compiler is one thing, but one should at least pass the grammar of the language through a parser generator to let it check the grammar for ambiguity.