Disagree--I used to have that objection with automatics, but the modern ones are good enough I no longer feel that way. Never have I felt my Corolla made the wrong choice about gears.
That's what I was thinking of, also--and I don't see it in my Corolla. It's always at least as good as the manual I drove before. It's got two downshifts rather than a paddle shifter, but since I discovered the cruise control does a better job than downshifting I haven't used them at all. The only case the cruise control doesn't handle is that for some reason it drops out at 28mph--I'm guessing it's a limit in the adaptive tracking. Thus you can't use cruise control to hold it to 25 mph going downhill.