As an absolute noob, I see some benefits in autos for myself, both in terms of getting to know my eventual setup and learning to deal with the challenges/fuck-ups therein, and also, to try and take some ladies through to harvest while slowly vegging out some larger ones for a couple of months+ that will hopefully end up yielding something more substantial - I think all the waiting for photos to grow would cause me to tinker with them too much initially, so the autos could save the photos from a noob mistake or two, while getting some errors out of the way without costing quite as much wasted time and energy or end product. I don't expect to get good yields in the first few grows as there's so much to learn, but I see some niches for auto grows along the way in my case. I'm sure there are valid reasons for others to grow them too with the shorter life-cycles, typically smaller plants, their ability to flower under any light schedule etc.