Where I drive the surface streets only have short sections that are straight and there are hills everywhere. This makes cruise control a necessity to avoid speeding tickets. During my Autopilot trial I only had TACC which slowed down every time it detected a car parallel parked on the side of a curvy road. This made it unusable.
You make a very good point about situations where regular old cruise control can actually perform better than TACC. I hadn't ever thought about that. It's too bad that if you have EAP that there's no way to activate only regular cruse control, it's TACC or nothing.