At the end of the day if the fundamental goal of most five string players was to get lower notes then tuning down a fourth to BEAD or the other tuning options on a four string would be a lot more popular than they are. It is nice to have the low notes but the one big advantage of a fiver is that it gives you more notes in any given hand position. Yes, you get lower notes from the positions down by the nut and, yes, the low notes are nice/fun/essential/etc/etc/etc, but the more notes per hand position advantage applies at every position up and down the entire length of the neck. This is the advantage that convinced me to try a fiver.
I made several attempts to learn to love a fiver using two different basses, a Fender and an Ibanez, that are significantly different in layout. Neither one worked well for me. But then, just for grins, I bought a Squier VI. Different and very tight string spacing, shorter scale, one more string yet to deal with, plus a whammy bar. It is insanely different, so different that I could not try to adjust what I liked to do to play it as I did with the fivers, I had to just go wholesale into relearning everything completely. And that worked, I can now play either a Fender or an Ibanez fiver just fine, although I prefer the Ibby and have my Fender up for sale. So, if you are struggling to play a fiver and just can't quite learn to love them, there is another thing you can try. You don't have to use a bass VI kind of instrument, any actual guitar you can borrow for a while or buy cheaply will teach you how to retool your technique and like me you might then find that going from four to five strings on a bass is a piece of cake.
I don't know about other genres but if your goal is to work in the praise and worship music recording scene then a low B may be essential, but in a typical church setting it is quite possible that no one is going to notice your low B and care enough to say anything about it. I've been playing low tuned fours for four years and so far only one person, one of our drummers, has noticed that I do that. The other bassists have never noticed, several music majors who actively work in the profession they were trained for have not noticed, no one in the congregation has noticed. At least none have noticed and said anything which tends to mean that if they did notice they don't care enough to comment about it either way. Nothing gets by that drummer however. He noticed no more than half way through the rehearsal where we first worked together and pulled me aside and asked how I did that at the first break.
