I like manual transmissions. Both my cars have classic three-pedal five-speed setups. So did the Subie Forester I had there for a while. In fact, most every car I've had since the late '80s except for three ('84 Trans Am, '86 Fiero, and that godawful K-car) had a traditional manual transmission, as did all my motorcycles of course.
That being said, I'm fully cognizant of the fact that the traditional manual ceased being the high performance option in most cars a long time ago. Various paddle-shifted twin-clutch semiautomatic transmissions or whatever have exceeded them; they fire off the shifts much faster and without risk of a miss and often these days you can skip most manual shifting and the robot will do just fine. Certainly in raw straight-line acceleration, the human is the weakest link.
Related, there's a certain siren song that attaches to running the camera in manual. Go on a photography forum and the guys who've been shooting since the film days will curl their lip and sneer at novices who don't lock the dial in "M".
So they're telling me to take a camera with enormously sophisticated metering abilities and just ignore them and either wing it using the "sunny 16" rule or bust out a separate light meter.
While I got to where I can do that, and it's necessary with the old Leica IIIb or the Zorki, it's just not necessary. "Program mode", which debuted on Canon's A-1 back in 1978, uses the camera's built-in light meter and the user's input of the film speed or selected ISO setting for the sensor to determine the optimal exposure for what it "sees" through the lens.
On a modern camera interface, you can "shift the program" by twirling the command dial and it will rotate through a range of aperture and shutter speed combinations that will give you the same exposure result*, in case you need to prioritize depth of field or action-freezing shutter speed. Combine this ability with the fact that you can set the camera's light meter to just measure the center spot, measure the whole scene but favor the center, or do complex "evaluative" or "matrix" metering of the whole scene.
The robot is better at this than you are. (And if you absolutely need a specific depth of field or shutter speed, there's always Aperture Priority or Shutter Priority.)
I'm pretty much coming around to the opinion that ninety percent of the time if you're shooting in M, you're wasting time spinning dials just because you can. And that's okay, I'm not the fun police!
*As an example, I just picked up the Nikon D3 and pointed it out the kitchen window, set at its base ISO of 200. The camera wanted to do 1/100th at f/5. Thumbing the rear command dial one click left shifted that to 1/80th at f/5.6, and one click right gave 1/125th at f/4.5.
