Actually you have my support for going manual. I still prefer to do all my projects without ARC (and I'm not old-school, unless 2009 is old-school). I just feel dirty everytime I use ARC, like I'm being sloppy haha. It also hides a lot about memory management that new people might never learn (and thus be in bigger trouble when something does go wrong). But I accept that it does have major advantages...

One trouble now is you never know if a library or whatnot will be ARC so it fragments things somewhat.