It is about the feeling of control now. The reason people who still choose manuals do so isn't because of the torque curves -- automatics are now better at handling that -- it's because they like the feeling.
When you're used to a manual, an automatic feels mushy. An EV is directly coupled, so adding a manual transmission makes it more must, rather than less.
Disagree--I used to have that objection with automatics, but the modern ones are good enough I no longer feel that way. Never have I felt my Corolla made the wrong choice about gears.
It's the lag on the accelerator pedal that I think of when I think of mush.
That's what I was thinking of, also--and I don't see it in my Corolla. It's always at least as good as the manual I drove before. It's got two downshifts rather than a paddle shifter, but since I discovered the cruise control does a better job than downshifting I haven't used them at all. The only case the cruise control doesn't handle is that for some reason it drops out at 28mph--I'm guessing it's a limit in the adaptive tracking. Thus you can't use cruise control to hold it to 25 mph going downhill.
It's because I want to choose. Even your fancy Doppelkupplungsgetriebe (in auto mode) doesn't know or care what I want to do.