Quote: "As far as I know, the amount of extra time spent in doing manual memory management is negligible, and maintenance? You only need maintenance if you're code is buggy, which is an error with the object between the keyboard and the chair, not the programming language. Again, same with stability."
If you're writing something complex (especially using multithreading) and you have a lot of resource sharing going, sometimes with mutual references, you're going to be spending a certain amount of time making sure you are correctly freeing resources when you are supposed to, as well as writing specific code for exceptional references (mutual references, for example). Yes, if you're a good programmer the chances of such mistakes might be lessened but even a genius can make mistakes sometimes.
As far as maintenance goes, if you have anyone working with you you have to make sure they understand the resource handling just as well as you do. Not only that, but if you come back to the project after several months you'll have to remember exactly what is going on, too.
As I said, the benefit (ie. slightly increased speed depending on the application) isn't really so great for things such as word processors, web browsers, calculators, and other regular applications. At least, not so great that I'd bother to do manual memory management if I could choose to use auto.
Oh, and if you're writing modular code every module has to be aware of how the resource handling works if it needs to share any such resources.
