Your car's automatic climate control system seems terribly designed and not like any one I've ever experienced. The climate control system on my Accord came out in 1996 and it behaved far superior to that. It doesn't just blow max heat/cold until the target temperature, it does a reasonable gradient of temperature differences until its the target temp keeping in mind some kind of comfort profile. This has been the way every other automatic climate control system I've used has behaved, I've never experienced it blasting heat/cold as hard as can be full bore, unless it legitimately needed that to keep up with the losses (having the windows open).

I'm sorry your experiences suck and you have to manually adjust your AC system dozens of times per drive to make your car comfortable. Personally though I see that as a massive step back, not an improvement. Would you mind sharing the make of car so I can be sure to avoid it?

Also, when talking about automatic climate control, do you also have it set to automatic fan speed as well, or just temperature? Maybe your system would perform better if you let it also control the fan speed if you aren't already. For my experiences I pretty much always let directionality, fan speed, and temperature set to be automatically controlled.