The advantage of a powered landing is significant.
First, precision: landing on a pad is operationally vastly superior than landing in a several mile drop zone. The latter must be in some depopulated area for safety, which has obvious downsides. Being able to land without bringing into play a whole search and rescue aparatus is huge.
Second, turnaround time. Parachutes are fussy, and re-installing new, carefully packed chutes along with all the pyro bolts and whatnot and verifying the whole system checks out is an expensive and complex thing to do for each flight. Landing on rockets means that you only need to inspect and refuel before the next flight, which you would need to do regardless, is very much streamlined compared to the use of parachutes.
They'll probably still be landing in depopulated areas --- you want to minimize damage on the ground if the propulsive landing system fails. (In which case, by the way, the plan is to still use parachutes as a backup.)
However, in case of a normal landing, it lets you land near pre-positioned processing facilities, and saves you the currently long transit time from the landing site to decommissioning that the spacecraft is currently on. (A couple of days at sea to the docks, and then trucked to SpaceX facilities elsewhere for propellant off-loading and other processing.)
As to not repacking parachutes --- the 'chutes will still be there, as a backup system, and I expect that at least the first few times a reused Dragon is launched, they'll have inspected everything pretty thoroughly to determine that it was still operable. Economy starts with not building another one completely from scratch; further measures can come later.
First, precision: landing on a pad is operationally vastly superior than landing in a several mile drop zone. The latter must be in some depopulated area for safety, which has obvious downsides. Being able to land without bringing into play a whole search and rescue aparatus is huge.
Second, turnaround time. Parachutes are fussy, and re-installing new, carefully packed chutes along with all the pyro bolts and whatnot and verifying the whole system checks out is an expensive and complex thing to do for each flight. Landing on rockets means that you only need to inspect and refuel before the next flight, which you would need to do regardless, is very much streamlined compared to the use of parachutes.