The Auto is in my mind the better box for those long journeys (which is what my Aero does), but for Sunday morning hooning (not that I seem to ever do that these days) I'd take the manual any time.
I do miss the option of being able to blip the throttle on a downshift, but I'm sure that it would be possible to get a paddleshift set up fairly simply that would do the perfect blip - the Aston V8V uses the same ZF gearbox (maybe I'm wrong?) I think, so I would have thought that it is emminently achieveable...
