doesn't account for the trade-off between looks and framerate that a player wants,

Yeah, I thought about talking about that in my comment too. Like, maybe a good route would be to have something like a target minimum FPS slider or something. That -- theoretically, if implemented well -- could provide a way to do reasonable settings on a limitred per-player basis without a lot of time investment by the player and without smacking into the "player expects maximum settings to work" issue.

There are also a few people who want the ability to ram quality way up and do not care at all about frame rate for certain things like screenshots, which complicates matters.

I think that one of the big problems is that if any games out there do a "bad" job of choosing settings, which I have seen many games do, it kills player trust in the "auto callibration" feature. So the developers of Game A are impacted by what the developers of Game B do. And there's no real way that they can solve that problem.