> I'm not going to say "you're wrong" but I think there are plenty of situations where you know or can anticipate what gear you need to tackle a certain scenario, where an auto simply can't know.

I know what you mean, the similarity between an automatic and a race driver was only meant to be about the specific context of fuel efficiency, not about shaving of a few more second from your lap times. But in the end, both of those wildly different optimization goals can benefit from a driver's superior ability to anticipate future power demand. And both goals create comparable challenges in "coaxing them through throttle alone", which describes my frustration with automatics pretty well. In day to day driving, people seem to want a certain amount of acceleration at non-aggressive rpm, and automatics that make it hard or even impossible to tap the full low-rev torque of a given engine make people buy bigger engines than they would need if the transmission would better support their use case.

Give me an automatic that allows me to apply unrestricted (by backshifting) torque at any rpm and I would look at it much more favorable.