For me, one of the blessing of originally shooting with a really really old film camera (Pentax Spotmatic) is that I HAD to learn manual mode, because that’s all the camera did! When I first got my DSLR, I turned my nose up at the auto mode (lol although now I sometimes use it. My favourite, though, is aperature priority. Manual mode does require some though at first, but it’s like anything else: the more you do it, the easier it becomes.