I play GT5 for my own enjoyment, and I enjoy it best as a challenge. Maybe it's because I was introduced to real racing games with Papyrus' early catalogue, which are of course the fore-runners of iRacing.
I agree that people can use whatever they want to get the enjoyment out of the game. This includes SRF, something I don't personally understand. I should probably test it out sometime. I am worried that certain events and licences now dictate the use of SRF - again, I should test it out.
I also agree that ASM is a nightmare if you're driving near the limit (i.e. racing) because it uses the brakes and tends to bog the car down as you attempt to (four-wheel) drift onto the apex.
TCS, for me, is next-to-useless in that it's totally binary - i.e. by either allowing longitudinal slip or not, with the slider seemingly adjusting how much the TCS accounts for
lateral slip (that is, TCS on 1 kills all slip in a straight line, but the moment you turn the wheel the car is off!) Inconsistent and unreliable are two things I can do without when trying to be consistent and reliable in a race.
Entertainingly, I found turning TCS off allowed me to be so much faster on the SLS AMG wet challenges, where you could spin the tyres up, get some heat into them, allowing less slip and so more acceleration out of corners - this is useful because the tyres cool down again so quickly.
The driving line is neither here nor there. I've tended only to "peek" at it for licence tests in the past (GT3) but don't really need it now I'm more experienced. At least, I like finding my own sets of lines through corners ("wrong" or "right"), and technically in a race the best line is always changing anyway due to obstacles and changing conditions (inc. tyres), which is something I'm quite good at adapting to, probably because I learned without the driving line.
I also race without ABS, however this can be a liability online. This is largely due the tendency for braking distances to be massively increased, itself due mostly to the difficulty in trail braking without ABS vs. with it (note that Porsches tend to only really activate the ABS when the car is yawing and braking, whilst DC2 Integra Type Rs seem to adaptively allow the wheels to lock momentarily before the ABS kicks in, both of which GT5 doesn't cover and both of which were intended to allow for better controllability at the limit.)
I mostly love the ability to turn the car on the brakes and turning off ABS really opens this up, however this extra speed at the apex is often negated by the increased braking distance, and I often find people climbing up my chuff in braking zones online, so resulting in a punt or three.
Finally, I use H-pattern for most things because it's more involving. This is yet another liability online, as I occasionally mis-shift on the straights or, more commonly, in the braking zones leaving me floating on the apex fishing for a gear, often leading to more punting. It's fun racing against other people who use the same settings as I do, since the extra controllability and reliance on fine control in the braking areas makes for close, heated yet gentlemanly racing, because you respect each other's space more.
EDIT: oops, essay is well over the word-limit. Sorry!
I managed to gold them on my first save with ABS/ASM on, but on my second save I turned it off and it made those events 10x easier. It really is unnecessary as it means the AI can actually keep their speed up on the banked turns, whereas yours drops dramatically, you can barely keep up even with a toe from the other cars.
