[billybobsky]

Short answer: no.

Long answer: they are fixing bugs. But not just any old bugs, obvious bugs that everyone with any sense knew to avoid using -- the beauty that was the original minecart boosters were so buggy that you could cause a server crash if you over used the boost giving your minecart essentially 'infinite' energy. It's one of the reasons why I am very careful with my redstone creations, too often when I was building circuits at bridgeport I would rely on a quirk that was clearly an unintended behavior. Subsequent circuits/automation are very clearly within the 'normal' parameters of minecraft.

I think the problem comes from Notch's initial knee jerk reactions against certain types of automation -- when he was still developing, he went out of his way to kill mob farms many many different times. But that perspective changed with Jeb and Dinnerbone -- mob farms became more resource intensive to build, but they realized at some point you need to stop punishing players who want to build in survival, and allow 'character'/resource progression.

So no, automation is not going away. The charcoal generator will still generate charcoal, the mob trap will still kill mobs (unless they decide on an utterly different mob spawning algorithm, but that honestly is unlikely as it hasn't changed that much since 1.0), your farms and hoppers and snow golem farms will likely continue to work. Caveat: snow golem farm might fail if golems do not 'snow' blocks they are not immediately touching, but it is a minor change, the fundamentals will still work.