Most of the people responding here aren't really assessing Jackson properly. The reason Jackson is better than the various replacement draw or recursion options is because he does both and more.
Jackson is in every winning deck because he is 2 for 1 card with negligible downside. Worst case he costs you 3 influence if you're not playing NBN.... that's it. Otherwise he provides you with draw for combo pieces, draw, discard, and archive filtering for shitty hands, shuffle effect for R&D lock, recursion for vital cards (agenda or combo) in the case of mill or forced discard. And he does all of that for the low low price of... one click. Oh... and he's an asset so you get to install him in a remote and may make the runner waste a click running him if that's helpful. Oh, and if he's unprotected you get to choose whether that run is actually a successful run or not in situations where it matters.
Can you play a deck without Jackson? Sure. Can you play a great deck without Jackson? Sure. Would your great deck probably be better with Jackson? Yeah, probably. Jackson's that good. If you're talking about absolutely optimizing your decks to have the highest possible chance of winning, then you very likely play Jackson. Saying anything else might feel good but is pretty unlikely to be true.
Peter
P.S. I could be wrong. I tried very hard to avoid saying absolutely, without a doubt, you must 100% play Jackson. First, it's not true. I've played games with Jackson in the deck where he wasn't a factor at all. So you can absolutely win without him. Second, there might be an amazing top tier deck out there that's not NBN and requires all of its influence for specific parts. But... most of the signs point to Jackson as being too good to pass up.
