yes that is the basic reson they cost so much. a good auto router saves you a lot of time. but it is a nice habit to manually route the important tracks line diff pairs and so on manualy and then lock them and then route others in auto route mode.
auto placement of components is a bad choise.
hock
first use auto route for look all routing, so you can look line every line betwen component, if no good routing, replace another component.
for finishing route, use manual route all...
Depends on what do you do !
If you use Monoface and DoubleFace,with meny constraints and rules, is very difficult to use it.
Yes manual route,needs more time (apparently), but I never use autoroute for my project !!