Reading through most of this, it seem to me the conflict between techs is mostly with pricing and scripting. As for pricing: I'm not sure how most of you are set up but I have an office built onto my home. No employees, almost no overhead. I live in a very low income area and the cost of living is cheap. This is how I can keep my rates so low and still make a decent living. I'm not trying to get rich off this. The average job here pays maybe $8 per hour so you can see that my $35 per hour is not bad at all.
As for scripting: There seems to be two schools of thought going on here. On one side we have the guys who think you must manually do every single thing for it to be done right no matter how mundane. The other side seems to think almost everything can be automated. I tend to see things more from that side. I'd say around 60-70% of what I do to a system could be automated. Lets see, Run AFT Cleaner, Ccleaner and PureRA. Run Malwarebytes, Superantispyware and a few other malware detectors. Startup Lite. Sure I can run all these manually and it take maybe 5 mins. and get the scanners up and going, but whats wrong with pressing a single key to get the ball rolling since these are things I do on every system? Sure I go back with auto runs and Hijackthis to see if I missed something. I may even have to dig into the reg manually but these times are few and far between. The above procedure combined with chkdsk /r and a defrag will take care of a large % of computers unless there is a hardware or rootkit issue.
In general I think the people who like to go digging around in the reg manually do so because it looks more impressive. These are the same types who use the cmd line for moving files when they could simply drag and drop.
I suppose the manual only guys also manually delete all the reg entries left over from removed programs? It would be fun watching them manually delete the 900 some odd entries left over from office or the 94 entries left by Nero. When doing a tuneup and setting options you could manually do every single thing and it take 20-30 mins or use a reg script and do it in 30 seconds. The same options settings will be made regardless and I don't run the risk of forgetting something.
At the end of the day it should be about giving the customer back a clean healthy PC at a fair price and not about how complex you can make it. The PC they get back from me will be as clean or even more clean than the one they get back for Mr. manual/cmd line and I can have it back to them in far less time.
