Charles,
A very lengthy reply, still a very quite day at the office here. You come from a different background. You have learned on the manual camera's and moved on to the automated ones. Hence you know how to apply the automation to get the best of it. I started with the automated stuff and moved to the manual stuff and so you have to see my comments in that light.
I'm not saying that a manual camera is better then an automated one, I am saying that a manual camera is a better learning tool then an automated one. You're comment that you can turn off automation and shoot manual is technically valid but the issue is that a user is faced with a $1500 camera equipped with the best matrix metering system around and it takes a lot of confidence to overrule that. The point is that the automated camera's made me feel that correct exposure setting was difficult. Why else would Nikon/Canon put so much effort in developing matrix metering? Why could they still not make one that's 100% correct? Why are all the reviews always paying a lot of attention to the automated exposure settings? Surely it must be difficult then. Then if it is difficult then why should I override it and not trust the technology.
I'm a kid of the computer generation and our attitude is that automation is superior to manual, hence our difficulty to override camera settings. That is a real paradigm that is out there with many photographers. Ask aspiring photographers which technical area they believe to be the most complex and difficult to learn and they will say exposure. The abundance of choices and methods are intimidating to them. Matrix, center weighted, large spot, customizable spot, regular spot, multi-spot averaging, zone system, incident metering, reflective metering and the program modes, sports, landscape, macro, portrait, are all terminology's and methods that are thrown at the aspiring photographer. Even in the manual metering arena there is a lot of confusing subject matter. Dome up or down? Pointed towards the camera, the sky or subject? It takes a lot of time, effort and film for people to start understanding that. Most will be so overwhelmed that will not even bother.
However if one starts with a manual camera you'll find that the principal of the thing is very simple to master. Even Sunny 16 works very well. Only a few rolls will learn you the principals of it and then you have a solid foundation from which to expand. Then you will begin to understand how to apply all the different methods and how they help speed things up. The sad fact is that many will never get there and will stay stuck in their auto mode because they cannot understand the paradigm that they are in. For these people the camera is more then a dark box that holds the film and the lens. It holds the knowledge that they lack and thus they put far more importance on the camera then is required. Go read the canon/nikon flames on the net. They are full of people that are debating that a 45 field evaluative metering pattern must be better then a 10 field matrix because of the sheer higher number of fields, same debate is going on about the 5 AF sensors to 45 AF sensors and the 1005 RGB sensors in the F5. There are very serious, committed amateurs out there that do believe that lugging a 3 pound proSLR around is the only way to get good pictures and that if your serious about your photography then stop complaining about the weight. If the weight is to much of an issue, get a P&S and stop nagging. I'm serious, I've read those comments often. Worse I even believed them for a while.
I see the same thing in the office. People trusting calculations because they are done with a spreadsheet. I've seen people presenting numbers that were absolutely gob smacked that I could spot errors in their spreadsheet calculations just doing the calculations in my head. How could the mighty PC be wrong?
However, now that I've learned to shoot manual I was surprised at how easy it is and at how much better it works for me. I now also understand why matrix metering will never be 100%. Now that I understand exposure I also feel that there is no such thing as a correct exposure. Exposure, as is composition, is a matter of taste on where you want the highlights and shadows to be, there is no automating that.
Camera bodies for me now are not important anymore. I judge them by the tools they have and most importantly the ergonomics of them and how they will support my shooting. For me matrix metering never really worked. I now understand that I favor lighting situations in which matrix metering does not excel. I now prefer spot and set manually or use the exposure compensation. I use the custom function on the F100 that allows you to set compensation with the tumbwheel and that works really fast and reliable for me. If I don't need the speed I still prefer the Hasselblad or the Leica.
So the manual camera's have made me a much better photographer in a shorter period of time then I would have been staying with Nikon only. An other fact is that I would not have picked them up had I not believed that their neg size and optics are better then nikons. So do Leica / Hasselblad make you a better photographer? Yes they do.