This was the reasoning my friends parents gave for getting her older sister a stick shift. After driving stick a while it just becomes habit. You don't even think about it. Though i do prefer being able to drop down a gear for extra acceleration on the highway, rather than waiting for the automatic transmission to figure it out and change gears 20 seconds after i needed it.
My plan is to get my son some really underpowered old stick-shift car when he learns to drive. If you're always rowing gears, you won't be texting and driving.
While I prefer driving a manual transmission as well, modern automatic/DCT transmissions are much better at engaging gears quickly when you ask them to than they were even ten years ago. In my current daily driver, one flick of the downshift paddle and the car instantly shifts down.
