Here in Europe we almost exclusively drive standard shift cars only. In fact, I've never driven an automatic shift car until very recently when I've visited my American girlfriend's parents the first time and found that's it's simply impossible to rent a standard shift car in the US. After a few hours I had to realise that modern automatic transmission systems these days are so good that unless you have special needs, there's simply no need to drive or even to learn to drive stick shift anymore. They're incredibly smooth and clever and completely abstract away the complexity of changing gears. It's like magic.

However, ARC is not quite there yet. It's a very useful tool but it's still a rather imperfect abstraction. You have to understand the problems with loops in object graphs, strong and weak references and why they're needed, bridging and all the other things ARC can't do for you yet. Maybe in a few years it will be possible to completely forget about memory management but today you simply cannot write a well behaving Objective-C application without understanding what's happening under the hood when it comes to memory management.