In article , Neil wrote:

Sandman:
Skills can be become outdated, and no longer needed. Sometimes a
skill can be used in different ways and still serve a purpose even
when something replaces the major usage of the skill.

Lots of skills have fallen away from photography, developing film,
light metering, manual focusing just to name a few. With new tools
that replace or do these things for you and with a better end
result, the skill is obsolete.

Developing film hasn't fallen away from those who still shoot film.

But it has "fallen away" as a means to produce photographs, when looking
generally. Just because there are "some" that still do it doesn't matter.
Developed photographs would be such a small portion of all photographs it
would be hard to even use fractions to express it :-D

Perhaps many users find the results of auto-focus to be superior to
their ability to manual focus, but that isn't universal.

No, but the photographers that prefers to do things manually is such a small
minority that they don't matter statistically.

In fact, except for simple scenes, manual focus can be faster and
more accurate.

For video, yes. Pulling focus is a skill. For todays modern still cameras,
focusing is so lightning fast and accurate that there are few scenarios where
manual focusing is needed for technical reasons.

The same can be said for metering; how one wants the
scene to appear is subjective, and one with the requisite skills can
often make the decisions to accomplish that without chimping or
taking a hundred shots.

Metering was essential in the analog world, in the digital world of RAW, the
cameras automatic metering and the dynamic range of the sensor renders manual
metering unneeded.

Sandman:
So the question is - if the end result is better and more
importantly; faster and more efficient, is there any value to the
skill in itself, or was it just needed because there was no better
way to do it before? "Better" is subjective; did one get the
result they were after or not?

Faster and more efficient depends on the skills of the users. If one
takes 100 shots of a scene, at some point any time saved shooting
will be more than offset during editing, and even then they may not
get what they were after.

But the topic here was specifically about saving time in editing. Not post-
processing, but editing.

--
Sandman