I LOVE this post! I get PSN messages sent to me commenting on what aid/transmission/car I may or may not be using and I am totally stealing you "fish and chip's" analogy. Many 👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍 to you Sir.
What I think is really funny, WhoosierGirl, is that almost every top driver in GT6 will tell you that driving a manual transmission in this game would actually make you faster. So, if someone is bitching about you using an AT instead of MT, just asking them if they want you to beat their butts even worse!
Now, I know you've stated several times that you can drive MT and you've practiced a bit with it, but you just feel more comfortable with AT and you certainly don't have all the free time that many GT6 players do to dedicate towards forcing yourself to switch. Again, at your level of performance you switching to a MT would most likely only hurt your lap times until you logged hundreds and hundreds of hours into driving MT. I don't blame you one bit for not caring that much about forcing yourself to drive MT. But giving you grief over it?
Having said all of that, I do sort of have a problem with top drivers using AS. First of all, if you took the Top 20 leader board from a random event and then forced anyone who used AS to re-run with AS turned off, I'd say there is a 98% chance that those same drivers would continue to remain in the Top 20 - it's just that the overall lap time would probably be a teeny bit slower than with it turned on.
I understand why SOME of the top drivers use AS. I'm sure they would rather drive with it turned off, but then they see the Top 50 is filled with the majority of drivers using it, and they want to see their name up in the Top 50 like usual, so they turn it on as well. Or, I'm sure there is a very small percentage of top drivers who just don't have the time to learn the nuances of the particular car/track combination, so they turn on AS so they don't have to worry about controlling the back-end of the car quite as much as they would with it turned off.
Regardless of the reason, I wish top drivers wouldn't use it. It is an artificial aid and their skills are already insanely badass that they don't need AS turned on for any other reason than vanity - seeing their name up on the leader board. I would bet that 99.9% of those top drivers who use AS would have something to say about another top level driver using ASM. And he should...ASM is an unrealistic driving aid, just like AS is. To me, it's one of those situations where "Yeah...I can't stand people using driving aids, well, except for the driving aids I prefer to use!" I don't mean this as an insult to anyone who might read this. As I said before, every single one of those Top 100 drivers who might use AS would kick my butt around the track with everything turned off - ABS included.
Personally, I wish the game grey'ed out the option to enable/disable driving aids like ASM, AS and SRF once you reach the S (Super) License Class. For arcade mode, you can still do whatever you want. But in career mode events, the training wheels are not just removed, they are thrown away.
In the interest of full disclosure, I have used AS a couple of times for Seasonal Events. The one that remains fresh in my mind was the Super Lap in the snow and then the Rally style race. I don't ever practice those events (type of driving) and I can't stand how it makes my wheel sound/feel. Im so afraid its going damage my DFGT so I'd like to be done with them as quickly as I can. Sadly, even with AS turned on I struggled with the snow event. But this is all just one man's opinion.
, but had a small victory improving myself.
. 🤬 Off!!!
,but in the end i was glad to get a somewhat average time 
And tonight I cannot play GT 
...And then there also are those new A spec seasonals. Meeh.... How do one find his time for all that....More meeh...
and really great job with the lap time also 
and every, I mean every freaking time I make it good trough first 3 sectors I just F it up 
