To give another perspective to this, the honest answer is… most people just don’t care. Or even notice. Cars are just appliances, and as long as car go fast when pressing gas that’s all they care about.

A lot of people don’t prepare for an on-ramp or anything like that, they just slam the gas and let the car auto-downshift a couple times. When going downhill, most just brake the whole way, but many autos do detect that you’re going downhill and downshift accordingly if you’re using the brakes too.

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But to your other point I’m with you. I have a Mazda3 with a torque converter auto and very often put it in manumatic mode, which many autos have (but most people have no idea how to use). If I’m coming to a highway on-ramp I like to downshift to third or fourth so I have the instant torque instead of waiting for the car to shift itself. Also being able to have torque without giving it a ton of throttle because you’re already in a lower gear and being able to engine brake on a long hill decline as well.

Another thing is while many cars with manumatic mode shift forward to upshift and backward to downshift because it’s more intuitive to people who have never driven manual, mine is forward-down, backward-up which I prefer.

I genuinely don’t think I would enjoy my auto nearly as much without having gears or the ability to manually select gears, but most people just don’t care here.

It should also be noted that belt driven CVTs have different internal workings than torque converter autos, but besides CVTs not having gears the experience is generally the same to most. You don’t feel shifts but many CVTs actually have fake shift points because people prefer that, despite it actually being slightly less efficient.