I agree with you. I like the idea and concept, but I prefer that apps like this actually let me do some of the teaching manually. Perhaps try to define the apps I want to appear at certain times of the day.
One of the reasons I stopped using Aviate was that I felt like their scenes just didn't really match what i was doing at the time.
I'd assume you prefer to do it yourself is because you haven't found a system that does it well enough for you to let go of control? Or are you just the kind of person who tends to like to do things the harder way?
I wouldn't blame you for being the latter - it's kind of like people who prefer to drive a manual transmission to automatic.
Just out of curiosity how long did you use Aviate for. I would assume their algorithm just keeps track of how many times you use an app at a specific location and then the premise would be after some amount of time it would reach a general consistency. To speed up that process It would be nice to be able to define a list of apps up front which have a greater weight and then hopefully it will reach a list of apps that you actually use over time.
One of the reasons I stopped using Aviate was that I felt like their scenes just didn't really match what i was doing at the time.