You'll find that it will cause the car to hold gears almost up to redline, which isn't great in traffic or when cruising. Whenever I drive an automatic, I ALWAYS use the paddle shifters and put the gearbox into manual mode so I have complete control over gearing.

That's one of the really really great things about electric cars: they are always ready to go, without having to control the gearbox.

Now, there's a tiny percentage of the population that enjoys paddle shifters, and even I do sometimes, but if we had usage tracking on them I would bet that fewer than 10% of drivers use paddle shifters for more than 5 times in the lifetime of the car, and that cars with paddle shifters are in automatic transmission mode 99.9% of miles driven.

So though some people will miss the gearbox, far far far more will rejoice in having a car that is always at maximum performance without messing with things.

I find automatics in 'D' will try to keep themselves in too high of a gear (practically idling around, presumably to save fuel) so a downshift is needed to accelerate

'S' behaves more like a human driving a manual - I assume the MPG and emissions testing is done in 'D'

I've tried the paddle shifters but they work poorly. Half the time it doesn't even register them. I'll be revving high, press the + paddle, and nothing changes.

Edit: so, I went to try sport mode and... turns out I've been driving around in sport mode all weekend already. Tried out "comfort" mode just to compare and couldn't see any difference. I'm sure a better driver could, but both are far away from instant response.