From your own experience and reading many posts like this and reading the manual, people are already aware the current system requires hands on and full attention. The manual does not say to turn on then tune out ... its says the opposite. It is not hands free or eyes off the road. People know this yet some still complain when not using the system properly.
Nobody said anything about turning it on and then tuning out. I'm talking about turning AP on because you have to do something that takes you away from complete concentration on the road for a few seconds. If Tesla wanted us to keep both hands on the wheel and eyes on the road every second, they should not have installed a touchscreen, because that basic design is fundamentally incompatible with perfect attention to the road or continuously keeping both your hands on the wheel. But they did, and AutoPilot used to do a very good job of making that poor design decision tolerable. In fact, that was arguably the main reason to use AutoPilot in the early days.
With these absolutely fascist instant zero-warning nags for the first half a minute after you engage AutoPilot, I find that AutoPilot is actually making interactions with the touchscreen take considerably
longer, resulting in me being way more distracted for a much longer period of time, because of having to deal with AutoPilot's distraction on top of whatever I was trying to do. That provably makes your driving
less safe than it otherwise would be if AutoPilot didn't have those ultra-paranoid startup nags, and in fact, provably less safe than it would be to do those actions on a car that doesn't even have AutoPilot-like capabilities at all.
It really is that simple from my perspective. These new changes to AutoPilot make driving less safe. A lot less safe. Distractions are fundamentally bad, and AutoPilot's beeping "You have to do something right now" nags distract people from driving. Every bit of extra effort you have to do above and beyond normal, reasonable driving behavior solely for the purpose of keeping AutoPilot from pitching a hissy fit like a spoiled 8-year-old distracts drivers, contributes to driver fatigue, and makes driving harder rather than easier.
This is not to say that AutoPilot should let you, as you put it, turn it on and tune out. But AP shouldn't be more sensitive when you first turn it on than it is when you have been running AutoPilot for five minutes. That's an absolutely stupid and user-hostile behavior that completely defeats its primary use, which is making Tesla's touchscreen not be the absolute worst user interface design choice in the entire history of automotive engineering.