Permanent timeshift ?

[AlexWilMac]

And, there was no "manual" mode when you had to remember to manually press "pause" to actually switch it on. It was either always ON or always OFF.

This is the part I don't understand, yet. It's true that PTS has to be installed (in BH, because OBH has it built-in) and I, too, was a bit surprised the first day of my life with VU+s (started and gone on with BH), that it was not in the image. But, after a quick search over the Internet, I found out about PTS. And when you install in, there is nothing "manual" to do. As I wrote, if it is disabled, you can just pause your live TV: only you cannot go backwards.
Instead, if its enabled, you can also do other two things, going backwards (and this was a feature I was already accustomed to have in previous PVRs) but also record it (and this was really new to me).
So I don't see this "manual" thing you say.