Aug 2006 to Feb 2008 = 18 months. Plenty of time to save around 60 AUD to get the XRT back (you only needed to put away $3.34 a month) I reckon in the short time Patch Y has been out you possibly could have saved that much anyway. But if you're in school and can't work full time there are still plenty of ways to make money. Just remember to stick to the legal ones
Being a Demo Racer not too far away in time myself, I rather preferred having the demonstration version the way it is now than how it was before that, since, as it has been said a thousand times, now it does represent the game as a whole, without having restricted classes.
Yes, you lose the XRT, but you have a representation of the whole range of cars (FWD, RWD and Open Wheelers/Single Seaters), being limited enough so you can learn how they handle and thus making an educated buy, which is mostly the purpose of any demo of a game.
About changing the time of the day, it's already there. If you were suggesting dinamic timeline for day/night transitions, it would be a good idea for a 'screenshot generator' as Scawen often refers to games that are focused on graphics a little bit too much and would add little into gameplay (except endurance races). Dinamic weather would be a far better addition to the gameplay instead and would make each race unique.
The way gears are being changed is something that might feed the discussion, but on overall I think that manual shifting is much more prone to represent the racing community and the simulator's goal than automatic would do. In any way, though, it would be a nice addition to immersion if a very limited range of cars had it, albeit cutting down the effectiveness of the car at throttle (they may not be as fast as the manual counterparts) and substitute the auto gearing option on the options menu.
Apparently you've never been to the land of automatics. (US) Most of the people into driving fast have manuals, but in a world of 90% automatics quite a few pop up.
Public relations is close to politics in the matter of taking things out of context and twisting meanings and words.
It's true that GT5 it's realistic - graphically
It's true that GT5 is a new benchmark - for the PS3's system capabilities
It's true it's a milestone in sim technology - graphically
Other than that, it's just 'another mix' with gorgeous looks, which sadly is the part that sells games, even over gameplay, specially to fanboys of their systems and casual gamers with big income.
After all the "woes" and "oohs" and "aaahs", there's just usually a rather void product.