Now you're just being contrary for its own sake.
It would be possible right now to create a programmable tuner that would make adjustments that slinkp and I mentioned above. That would be great, wouldn't it? While you're in the middle of a gig up there on a dimly lit stage, you could start scrolling through multiple menus to get to the patch you programmed, while your audience waits. That would surely be better than !
And if we ever get to the point that a player needs a tuning system to automatically decide the optimal temperament for him -- instead of deciding for himself when and where he needs to change -- then he should consider giving up playing.
To follow your example for sake of argument, lieber Dave: I believe that the philosophical difference between
(i) your guitar tech tuning your guitars to your liking manually and handing them back to you
(i) him (or her) scrolling through the menus and sending your guitar a signal to tune up on stage from wherever he's sitting behind the stage
is miniscule. And it's been a long time since I've seen professional performers regularly correct tuning on the stage themselves. I just see them hand their guitars to their techs and get a new one. Your lovably archaic "having to spend a second or two to twist a tuning key a tiny fraction of an inch" sounds easier than it is when 10,000 people in the arena are watching. It still happens, but rarely. Joan Baez did it when I saw her in Bonn two weeks ago, but she was alone on stage and had an audience of aging baby boomers eating from her hands who would have given her 10 minutes of tuning up time just to listen to the stories she was telling while she was doing it.
I've been to Eagles concerts - those beloved or derided purveyors of perfection - where an acoustic guitar was out of tune and I bet Glenn Frey (who can probably tune a guitar quite well, but choses not to at concerts I've seen) and his guitar tech would have appreciated automatic tuning in the middle of the song to get the tuning just right. And I've only recently been to a Blackmore's Night concert where one of the stringed instruments - it was baking hot in that hall - was so badly out of tune it kept Herr Blackmore from playing that particular song which put him in a pissed off mood for the rest of the evening (and had his guitar tech probably fear for his life), he is difficult that way. Now I know that mentioning him is a bone of contention here and that is why I regularly avoid it, but last I heard
I believed we were all in agreement that he can tune a guitar. He used to do so in the 70ies quite often on stage after having put his Strat through the usual tremolo arm rigours.
All this just to point out: It ain't necessarily so.