I keep my blood pythons on newspaper in a darkened room with no hides! They are doing spectacularly well! woohoooooooo blood pythons!
seriously, we're keeping them in captivity. Not the wild. Using newspaper isn't a sign of laziness as much as it is a sign of practicality and utilization of cheap, readily available resources. Unless you have a completely bio-active vivarium set up for your snake (which is amazing if you do, but beyond the means of most people), newspaper is a great way to go. Because when the snake goes, there's a lot more than just the solid part. In fact, my snakes expel pure liquid waste three or four days after eating, and if I were using a substrate such as aspen, sphagnum, or coconut fiber, I'd be spending a fortune every week replacing that crap. And if I just spot-cleaned, that's a lot of liquid urates I'd be leaving in the cage, which means a lot of ammonia and phosphorus exposure for my snakes. And that's something I really don't want.
As far as security issues, give the snake a hide box. If the snake wants to hide, it probably doesn't care either way if it ends up hiding in a burrow or a hide box, as long as the snake gets to hide. My young snakes have hides available to them; most of the time, only my baby blood pythons use them. My carpets do occasionally, but I usually find one sitting in the corner of her cage and the other sitting on top of her hide. The adult snakes eventually reached a point where they didn't really care to hide in a box.
Again, we're keeping them in captivity, not nature. A captive-raised snake that is handled regularly and gently is going to become a lot more secure and will feel less pressure to hide than a wild snake which knows it has to worry about predation.