I like the way you extended this metaphor to other things than just tech products. However, in my opinion you have it slightly backwards.

I think of driving an automatic car as the less efficient but simpler and more user friendly experience. Automatic cars can sometimes shift gears at the wrong time or hold off on shifting when they shouldn’t. When driving a manual car, you are in full control of how the car works, and you can make sure that it behave optimally if you know what you are doing.

To extend this metaphor you can compare programming languages like Ruby, to lower level languages like C. With Ruby, you have a simpler and more elegant experience but you don’t get the control and optimization that C offers.