Kevin
I don't understand the criticism of this idea, or how anyone can say that the concept of not having to press a button to train a driver is in some way "dumbing the game down".
The facilities build themselves automatically in the background when you're not logged in, health recovers at 5% per hour when you're not logged in, yet nobody suggests this is dumbing down the game.
We already moved part way to automated training when the Devs introduced the training multiplier some years ago. Before this, you had to press the training button at least half a dozen times a day to fully train a driver. This was irritating so the Devs introduced the multiplier which you can set at X10 meaning you only need to press the button once. The next logical step would be to remove the need to press a button at all. You would still need to initiate the training but it would happen automatically in the background.
IMHO, removing the need to make unnecessary button presses is not dumbing the game down. My preference would be to automate training (as suggested by the OP) but make the options more varied so you have to really think about where you want to develop your driver. Instead of having only three areas (Driving, Mental and Physical) and leaving the game to decide which exact attribute to increment, every one of these would be individually selectable by the manager. A bit like buildings, some of them would be more powerful than others and these would take longer to train once initiated.
I appreciate you have been playing here for a long time and have no idea if you have played other games, but being expected to manually click on a button to improve/train/upgrade etc is pretty normal in the gaming world especially in management/strategy games.
Moving more and more aspects of this game to automation is not necessarily a good thing and I do believe the term dumbing down is an accurate one. A good example of this is Manager XP this is added automatically, but it would be much better if the Manager had the choice of when to apply this especially as the relationship between Manager level and research power is broken. At the higher levels. They might not be ready to move up a level based on their current staff/ building levels and may not be in a position to replace these once they have been auto upgraded.