As a beginner, I find autorouting entirely unnecessary for the level of complexity I work with. Routing is pretty much the simplest part of the process to understand and somewhere between a fun puzzle and a tedious but simple chore depending on the specific design. I'm pretty sure there used to be a very popular mobile game that, while visually completely different, had the exact kind of "mechanics" as manually placing traces on a PCB does.

What would be helpful, however, are some better checking tools. Some mistakes, like running a trace right through the bottom side of a through-hole and creating a short that wasn't there on the schematic, seem very easy to detect and warn the user about before they end up spending hours cutting traces and running bodge wires.