I would argue that the scatter is better suited tool for things like gravel, than the pattern is. For one, it's so much easier to get decent assets for the scatter than for the pattern. Heck, you can even generate few spheres, add some noise deformation, spherically map any rock like texture on top, scatter them up and it would look decent from any angle, except most extreme close-ups. As additional benefits - no repeating tiling, which is almost impossible to avoid with pattern and also you can add global dirt/variation texture on top (not available in pattern too).