Manual focus. why the obsession?

It is nice to have manual focus at times, just as it is beneficial to be able to set exposure manually. I recently was taking an image of an eagle, albeit not with a Fuji XPro1, I was shooting with a Canon 50D and a 70-200 L, because of the distance involved, and the branches through which I was shooting, manual focus worked better since auto focus was locking on on the surrounding branches. Without manual focus, it would have been basically impossible to get accurate focus.