I find it interesting you think people want more control over tuning. If we wanted more control wouldn't the standard response to someone adding an index hint to a query be a positive one?

More automated optimization is the way to go. With automated optimization SQL can adjust on the fly to changing conditions. However, there will always be places we don't want SQL to take over. I don't want it automatically creating indexes no matter how much it thinks they will help. And we'll always need the ability to override at least some parts of the optimization for when we just can't get SQL to choose the best plan.