I much prefer auto updating. Fuck doing it myself.
I messed with the screen dpi on my Nexus 4 a while back and set it to a non standard value which the play store didn't like. That meant nothing updating. When I fixed the dpi issue I had to go and manually update about 50 apps, much prefer my phone do it when it wants to, though that does seem to be at fairly random intervals.
Surely you didn't have to manually update all of them? You just say 'update all'? Only time it wants manual ones per app is if they change permissions, which I assume would also prevent an auto update.
Not all of them but quite a few. It had been so long (a couple of months I think) that many apps had permissions changes.