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If you guys always sleep and never shut down...
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I've only had my Air for a little over two weeks, but I practice the same approach as all of my other PCs and laptops (this is my first OS X device); Within the day, if I plan to use the Air again, I sleep it. If I'm going to bed, I shut down. In other words, if I know I'll use it soon again, let it sleep. If I know it will be several hours (5+) before I have an opportunity to use it again, I shut it down.
The only exception to this rule is my iPad. I usually leave it one and only reboot once in a while (usually when charging, I close all apps, plug it in, and then shut it down while it charges).
Every two to six weeks keeps my MBP under contol. If I end up with less than 2gb free (ram) I will restart (this is with safari, iTunes and evernote/word open)
I never shut down any of my Macs. Always on. Only restart as required for software update. No problems.
Mac OS X handles memory management quite well. There is no need to restart to free up memory. Many Mac users only restart for Software Updates, having uptime of several weeks or months with no performance degradation.
There's more to the picture than free RAM. Your restarts are unnecessary.
Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor
I just flip down my lid and it hasn't caused me any problems. It just saves time & is handy if I just need to quickly do a single search and go.
Memory leaking is a very small (or non-existant) problem on OS X imo. I've noticed some app, lite Firefox, can start to build up on memory over time. But then just quit the app and restart it and you're back. I only restart my Air on system updates, and there aren't a lot of them. A few weeks at a time isn't any problem at all, and I have never needed a restart from low memory. Just restart any program that uses a lot of memory and it should be on about the same level as after a reboot.
That is frankly daft. "Free" memory has not been used at all. If you have 2GB "free" memory, you have 2 GB of memory chips that might as well not be there.
I hardly ever shut down mine either. But if I go for like a month without shutting down (happens all the time), sometimes strange stuff starts happening... random application crashes, beachballing for simple processes. Seems like a simple restart fixes all those problems.
I shut mine down all the time ... takes 5 secs to shutdown and 15 secs to reboot.
Do whatever makes sense to you! No worries!
Every week or so I log out and log back in on my Air just to freshen things up a bit, and generally only reboot whenever a major software update comes around that demands one. It's been working well enough for many, many, many years of Mac use 