I love this thread. Quality banter without the hate.
FWIW - I can heel-toe, my wife can heel-toe, my kids drive their own cars, I've been driving manuals since 1984, my wife for longer, I ride a CBR1000RR, my wife rides a GSXR 750... We love manuals with a passion, but we love performance even more.
We came back from our test drive in the manual and were ready to sign papers. The salesman said he had an auto pulled up front and it was all warmed up for us to take for a drive if we wanted to. We weren't going to, but they had gone to the trouble to pull it up and get it ready for us, so we decided to go for a little joy ride (plus it was the color we wanted and the sun was going down).
We drove home in the AT.
We both track it, and every twin owner who has driven our auto has nothing but smiles when we're done joyriding. I make a point of letting MT owners drive our car to see what it's really like before they get too obnoxious about hating on ATs. I used to be an AT hater, especially in the 90's when you could hear kids driving around with fart-cans on their automatic Hondas. I just despised the sound of an automatic shifting when it had an exhaust. This thing makes the most glorious sounds on up and downshifts when you've got an exhaust you can hear. sounds like an F1 car.
oh, and I triple-tap downshifts all day long 6-3 and 5-2. The trick is to get the triple-tap done within 200 ms. That's actually the reason there is any delay at all in the time from your input to the time of the shift. They could program out the delay and make up and downshifts instant to the paddle, but if they did that, then you could not skip gears - since the pause is there, you can skip gears.
The only thing I miss from a manual is the ability to coast. you can do it in regular Drive mode pretty easily by just slipping the lever to N, but I'm almost always in Manual shift and there's no quick way to get to Neutral. I would almost like to see a pull and hold on both paddles put it into neutral. But then how would it know what gear to return to when you let go of both paddles? I dunno...