If settings are offered, people will want to know how to adjust them - whether that means set and forget, set every trip, or monkey with it every 10 seconds. Note that the last recommendation in that thread was basically "set it and forget it at full chirp" I don't think that that thread really points to constantly needing to adjust HBs. It just shows that they offer options (which may or may not have practical use) to do so, if the user is so inclined.
If you give someone looking for 99.99% performance a million knobs to turn, they'll turn them all, and probably tweak constantly. If you give someone looking for say 90 or 95% performance (pulling numbers from my ass) - they'll hit auto, adjust a setting or 2, be happy if they like what they see, and leave things alone.
My personal, and limited, experience with birds for as long as I recall, has been cumbersome menus, a lot of options with limited usefulness, some that can be useful, and awkward manipulations to do what I want to do (things like switching screens or manipulating overall setup). Raymarine's interface is on another planet for that stuff - also in limited experience but a great first impression. Lowrance is in between -an interface that I can get along with, but less smoothly. I don't see any of them as *requiring* constant babysitting, although in certain cases it doubtless helps (was replaying some Raymarine demo data at Cabelas the other day, and tweaking settings in sidevision away from auto made a substantial difference in visibility and detail of weeds/trees and fish/shadows in this case)