Never once have I been in rainy weather and thought "gee, what should I do?". I currently have a car with auto wipers (I'm not sure but I think they use the "standard" infrared sensor to detect rain) and I find them worse than manual, intermittent wipers in every way. I think the biggest problem is that the wipers tend to only go on when water is flowing down the windshield. But we get a lot of "misty" rain where I live, where the small drops will stick in place for some time. So my windshield will become covered with drops and difficult to see through before the wipers turn on, and since the car doesn't let me control the speed for intermittent wipers manually (there is just "high" and "low") I find myself manually hitting the wiper button every ten seconds or so.
I know this may seem like "Old man yells at cloud" (literally), but it's just a huge pet peeve of mine when the lower tech solution works great only to be replaced by something more complicated that does the job worse.