I was leafing through Richard Pepperman’s new book, Setting Up Your Scenes (Amazon) the other day. The book does not have much to recommend it, but it made me realize one thing: how little coverage I get compared with the examples mentioned in the book. When I declare my intention to shoot half a dozen set-ups the cast and crew collectively roll their eyes. The films in the book, by contrast, routinely employ twenty set-ups. I wonder how many takes and how much time they spend to do that. I feel that a lot of time gets wasted between set-ups. Time that perhaps would be better spent doing more takes rather than new set-ups.

If I had the means I would use another camera (too many would give me a headache) to get reaction shots. That would allow me to use more set-ups. For now I average about ten takes and five set-ups for each scene.

The benefit of getting more coverage is principally to increase editing options, but I think it also lends visual appeal. I think it would be boring to watch the whole scene from a master shot, unless you use a lot of ingenuity (say, by using camera movement to effectively get different shots).
What is your approach?