Regarding manual vs auto:
Most coins are only worth mining for maybe 15-30 seconds at a time. Due to all the "anti multipool" difficulty switchers, coins will change by factors of 5-10x in their difficulty, while their price moves only a fraction of that amount. Manual switching cannot be done fast enough for proper profit switching, unless you're *guessing* on a coin having a rally, which is no different than gambling.
The new system, once deployed, will be able to balance the pool hash rate over multiple profitable coins at once, where only a portion of the pool is moved based on what the difficulty of the highest profitable coin is. This system will also prioritize moving miners with lower stale rates, meaning that less hash rate will be wasted due to moving people who have horrible configurations (intensity too high).
Example:
1) DOGE is the most profitable coin at a difficulty of 700. 100% of the pool is set to DOGE.
2) WDC becomes the most profitable at a difficulty of 13. The pool moves 30% of its miners to WDC, leaving 70% of DOGE.
3) WDC difficulty adjusts, and that 30% is moved back to DOGE.
4) CSC becomes the most profitable at a difficulty of 0.8. The pool moves 10% of its miners to CSC.
5) LOT becomes even more profitable due to a high block reward, difficulty of 0.7. The pool moves 20% of the pool from DOGE to LOT, putting the split at 70/20/10.
6) The LOT block gets solved, new reward puts it much lower in profitability, all those miners return to DOGE.
7) CSC difficulty adjusts back up, those miners return to DOGE.
These are round numbers, but that's the idea of the new system. The pool will factor in the total speed of the pool compared to the difficulty of the newly profitable coin, to determine a base amount of speed to move to the coin. It will add a modifier based on how much more profitable the new coin is.
Since the new system no longer tracks per coin shares, the fact that you individually did not have your miner moved to CSC or LOT in that time frame does not mean you didn't benefit from the pool mining it.
I look forward to trying the new system, but I'm going to miss being able to mine individual coins with such ease.