[Lombra]

select is never "ideal". There are a few cases where it's required (namely, dealing with an argument list of unknown length), anything else is purely a matter of readability.

I would definitely do this, for example:

if select(10, returnStuff()) then

rather than

local _, _, _, _, _, _, _, _, _, x = returnStuff()
if x then

unless you're going to be calling it very frequently.