Full programmer control and preventing bugs, security holes and so on are not fundamentally opposed. It's not like most programmers go to work trying to make sure their software has a certain number of buffer overflows in it. It just turns out that preventing that in C is really, really hard.

To take the car analogy further, whether your car is manual or automatic, seat belts and airbags are valuable. Neither of them compromises a driver's full control of their car.