The purpose of any sort of manifold/false bottom/braid is the separate the sweet wort from the grain- "lautering".
Whatever gets the job done is the way to go! I have a false bottom, and it works great for me. Many others have braids or manifolds they made with copper or cPvc pipe! If you go into the "gallery", you can see many pictures of different set ups. They all work just fine!
The only thing I'll say about a braid as that you'll want to batch sparge and not fly sparge with it. The design works great for batch sparging, but it's not a good design for fly sparging due to the likelihood of channelling. That doesn't matter with batch sparging a bit, though.