Being a construction industry professional, specificly in this case a residential designer, I have some fixed ideas about housing design regarding basements.
First, whenever practical a house should have one. They make the positioning and service of mechanical equipment much more practical then houses without basements.
They also provide better temperature/humidity control for the living space above when compared to crawl spaces or slabs.
Basements should also have direct access to the outdoors. Having to move replacement furnaces, boilers, water heaters, well tanks thru the finished part of the house for replacement is simply not acceptable in my book.
Not to mention the kinds of personal items often used or stored in basements.
There is one design of basement access which is most effective if there is no plan to use the basement as day to day living space, or as a laundry room space.
That is to forgo both the traditional interior staircase, and the traditional exterior stair well or "Bilco" doors, in favor of a single staircase which comes up into an attached garage.
Properly designed this affords acceptable entrance from both the interior and exterior of the house. It also typically reduces the number steps to the basement as garages are at grade and at their deepest basement ceilings are typically 1-2 feet higher than grade.
This design was moderately common in ranchers here in the Mid Atlantic during the late 50's and 60's. But as total percentage of houses with basements it is rare.
My grandfather had some investment houses built in the early 60's. He insisted that the builder not only install "Bilco" door type exterior basement entries, but that the interior door at the bottom of the stairs have a "leaf" allowing it to open to a width of 4' matching the width of the stairs and bulkhead doors.
He said "what is the point of a basement if you can't get stuff in and out".
Sheldon