I accept that as a developer you have every right to develop your software as you see fit, and I have barely played the game (liked what I did so far). I think it's always a bit presumptuous forcing updates in any software, you can never know if all your changes will make the experience better for everyone, and allowing some means of version control for users (even if turned off by default to make it convenient for most) is preferable to not having it. I've had forced updates make software unusable on exotic configurations, I've had them make things unfit for what I was using it for, I've had it brick devices. As for limiting download size, doing delta updates between major versions could be an option for example.
Regardless, I tried the version in this thread (which auto-updated to 3.05) and ran into a game halting bug due to img/characters/!$3x5.png being missing while loading the city.
Just as a PS edit: I would like to restate that ultimately you have to do what works best for you, and if that ends up being continuing with the automated updates, so be it, people will adjust or they won't.
