Ah, but Michael -- what about the money thing? If you buy a car new, an automatic transmission adds about $1,000 to the price. When it (inevitably) needs to be replaced, that'll be something like $1,500, please. Repairs, too, are steep. A manual transmission is far more robust and comes, um, standard ...

The candlelight metaphor doesn't work with cars. Functionally, electric light is better than flame -- it's cleaner, brighter, safer. Functionally, an automatic transmission is not better than a manual -- it just replaces human effort (and judgement) with a machine process. That can be a good thing -- for example, in a heavy vehicle with lots of power and torque, such as the fancy SUVs marketed to suburbanites who don't need them. In yer typical four-cylinder subcompact, it's just one more thing that leaves an adult sitting still.