For me, tmuxinator[1] is a huge advantage. I can easily define environments suited to various tasks and projects, launch them easily and lose none of tmux's power in the process.

For example, my 'work' setup is very IDE-like; when it starts it mounts my dev VM (nfs), starts vim, opens windows for logs, database client, SSH to the VM, source control (tig and git).

[1] https://github.com/aziz/tmuxinator