Essentially, autopilot's main value proposition is that you don't need to pay attention to it -- and that's what makes it so dangerous.

She actually ended up disabling some of them. She explained that they "made driving too easy" and it was too hard for her to keep her attention on the road while using them.

There is a continuum between actively driving the car and falling asleep in the back seat, and AP puts you somewhere on the left side of the middle. It's generally great stuff.

All the point-to-point full-self-driving BS is meh, I don't really care about it, but give me world-class TACC and lane keeping (original autopilot) and I'm a happy commuter.

I largely agree with you here, having driven a car with adaptive cruise control in stop-and-go traffic and finding it to be a total game changer.

That said, I'd argue there's a huge difference between having the car micromanage the accelerator+brake versus having it micromanage the accelerator+brake+steering. With the former, the driver must remain engaged with the driving task (even though the most tedious aspect is taken care of), but with the latter, no engagement whatsoever is required.

Tesla maliciously advertises as much much more than adaptive cruise control, lane assist, etc, which is disgusting on their part.