Which cameras have worse "Auto" settings than a phone? I have two Fujifilms, a Panasonic, and a Nikon, and they all take better photos on "Auto" than my iPhone or any of my friends' Androids.
And who buys a camera in this day and age but doesn't want to play with the settings? Point and shoot users stick with their phones now.
Sharpening is a destructive process and the appropriate amount depends on how and what size you are using the image. It can also be easily applied anytime later. So enthusiast camera apply minimal sharpening and look under sharpened at small sizes, and phone cameras apply heavy sharpening but have artefacts if you zoom into them.
Same with saturation and 'ai' tricks like skin smoothing: users of enthusiast cameras often have different preferences.
Note, phone cameras don't do skin smoothing, people just think they do. (Unless you get a beauty camera app.)
The issue is that almost any processing has the effect of removing noise, which is the same as skin smoothing. If you're taking 2-3 images and merging them, it'll remove the noise even if you do something smarter than averaging the pixels - so you actually have to add steps to measure the noise level and add it back.
The same issue comes up in video compression, where there's dedicated film grain metadata since almost any compression kills the real thing.
https://www.thephoblographer.com/2018/01/04/film-emulsion-re...
Although their digital cameras' emulation modes of their old film stock are kinda lame. They also make those weird non-Bayer-format cameras which I'm not sure are worth the price.
Better or worse is of course entirely subjective. Maybe your real cameras take more neutral pictures, but people these days might expect less neutral pictures: more saturated, more HDR, more contrast.
The goal of photography is often not to look "real" or "neutral". For example, Ansel Adams took beautiful photos...but very stylized.
> And who buys a camera in this day and age but doesn't want to play with the settings? Point and shoot users stick with their phones now.
This point I tend to agree with. Imagine a device that combines the camera/photos interface of a smartphone (full screen viewfinder, touch controls, camera apps, on-device editing etc.) with the hardware of a camera (larger body allowing for bigger sensors, more lenses etc.). Basically the specs of a DSLR with an interface for the masses. Who would carry this with them? It sounds a bit like the novelty "dumb phones" that exist nowadays: very interesting, but a way too small market.
It's the opposite, most digital cameras aren't doing enough compared to smartphones, which have minimum control and look very good at 2M pixels. A proper camera with default settings looks bland in the hands of an amateur (too little saturation) and handles dynamic range poorly (without bracketing or post-processing). Plus it's never going to beat smartphones at connectivity (SNS), or portability.
Most people aren't going to spend time processing RAW files, or try to get in-camera picture control/film simulation etc. to look pleasing like photographers do.