You make a point... But... I found the aids helpful in coming to terms with this game using the 6-axis controller.
(sorry for the wall o text. hit a nerve I guess.
The roads, even having been improved in GT6 over GT5, are still often far less grippy than real roads (often on purpose in my opinion, like the carefully adjusted TOD to blind drivers at certain course for certain events, or the other trickery PDI employs to drag out "completion"), the cars often have far more power than most of us have in our real life cars (I drive a puny little SUVette with all of ?150HP?), many of the real world queues are missing, from a full visual field to missing acoustics and other "natural" sensory inputs, and to top it off, we tend to drive faster in games environments than in real life, all sum up to more control problems. At least in my opinion.
Personally, I had problems controlling the cars at first, even though I'm a pretty darned good driver in real life. Maybe not made of race car driver stuff, (too old and bruised anyway) but I control my real world vehicles pretty well. Yet, GT was a learning experience, and not just speed, but learning to drive with the albatross of missing feedback channels that in real life wouldn't be tolerated for any but tank drivers and the occasional test pilot, coupled with trumped up chicanery that PDi routinely employs to "increase challenge".
idk. I figure people will evolve when they do. I can suggest, but I tired very quickly of the officious folks involved with GT who tell others how they"must" play, as I suspect many others would/will/have. reading hard fast rules, you yourself have commented on how AT vs manual doesn't necessarily produce faster or slower, in fact going so far as to suggest that in the hands of a "qualified" driver, AT mode is as fast if not faster for many of the cars in GT6 (I'm condensing of course). While ATmode isn't technically an aid (or is it?), as I noted, it's about who controls *the OP's enjoyment. "
avoid allowing others to dictate how you enjoy the game. ...And that goes for my advise as well!" I've run into far too many over the years, particularly in this game, who explicitly do attempt to micromanage other peoples' driving and enjoyment, well beyond their rightful purview (aside from telling folks they should
not be driving backwards in a public room, or that wholesale cheating will reduce freedoms for all players due to their self-centered misuse and the predictable reaction and changes to code and permissions by the games authors) . Have also met many of them in music and art over the years. It's pompous, pretentious and transparently all about control, and without being forewarned, I believe many people will fall victim to the peer pressure element they use to control others (many will still eventually fall victim, but at least I tried).
Shrug of shoulders... each to his/her own. Someone that I'm not a good pal with or a parent or other "intimate" tells me how I should pick my guitar or how I should stroke my paint brush or which IDE I should use for programming (or snubs the one I say I do use), how to use my chisels when wood carving, how to face a stone or mortar a joint, or how to hit the keys on the piano or which aids I use in MY licensed copy of GT (or to imply that I'm a hack because I don't follow their rules of use, even though I have yet to use one hack or glitch and yet many of them use them every time they come up), my instinct is to tell them in no uncertain terms to go ____ themselves.
And at a guess, from reading your posts for the past year or so, and seeing that you have your own healthy sense of opinion, I'll bet you'd do the same.
After three years of subjecting myself to the snobberisms of the hypocritical few, pretty much the only hard-nosed rule I have in this game is this: screw the commissars, although screw isn't the word that comes to mind.