No, there hasn't been any change on this front lately. They've been tinkering with the various thresholds since the initial release last October, but the overall theme has remained the same: you can take your hands off the wheel for long stretches as long as the car is confident of its own ability, and once the car loses confidence beyond a certain point it will ask you to "reassure" it by holding the wheel.

There was a period for a few months where part of that algorithm seemed to include a timer, such that the car would always lose confidence after 3-5 minutes hands-free. But that was long before the current media fluff, and they changed it back to be more dynamic.

Wow. That is reassuring. I'm used to boat and plane autopilots. They disengage quite abruptly and usually after the situation has degraded. Leaving the pilot to figure out why and then take action.

Yeah, that's not good. Tesla's usually does a good job of gently encouraging you to help before things get bad. And with practice, you can learn the situations where it's likely to have trouble and take over preventively or just be ready to.