It could be worse, I have 50 of them. I'm not saying this to brag, it's a simple fact. When I built my house, I wanted ethernet drops in every room. Usually more than one, like 3-4 per bedroom, 6 in the office room, 3 in the kitchen, 6 in the attic, 2 in the garage, even 2 in the garden house... All cables are Cat7.

Not all of those are for internet access. I have one connection in every room for Sonos. (I know I can do that wirelessly too, but I always prefer wired) Almost every room has a TV connection (coax), and there's an ethernet connection next to it for the uplink of the digital TV.

I know I could have used a switch in every room, but I didn't want to do this, for two reasons:
1) All those little switch boxes quickly clutter up a room with cabling
2) The power used by all those little switches would quickly add up
3) They would also occupy a power socket in every room.

So in essence, I think it looks a lot cleaner. It probably cost me a lot less as well (not in effort when laying the cables, but I only had to do that once) AND I have full bandwidth on every cable (you never know what that's good for).
All those cables come together in two 24 port patch panels in a rack cabinet. That rack cabinet also houses the switch, so it's very easy to switch ports, create VLANs and actually have them ordered physically in a logical order etc...

I could really use a 48 port smart switch, but I haven't found one so far that is fanless. So I'll probably go with 24 port switches for just this reason. I like the this D-link one. For now I'm still using an HP Procurve 1400-24, but that's not a smart switch.