Keeping it simple:
When photography and I first met it was sometime around 1979, perhaps 1980 and I’ve never been the same. At that time I was using a Minolta SRT-101, fully manual camera. Photography had moved on from the range-finder, for the most part, as was going into the SLR phase. A friend of mine, Bob Jennings, who introduced me to photography was shooting with the same type of camera.
In those days, it was oh so simple: Look through the lens, line up the lollypop with the stick, take the picture, and advance the film. That was it. There were no electronics, save for the meter. The shutter speeds were manual and had a range of 1 second to 1/1000 second. The camera would still operate without the battery, but you had to guess at the exposure; I shot only black and white, so white balance was a non issue to me.
Fast forward to the present. Last year I purchased my first professional-level camera, a Nikon D2X. This camera can, seemingly, do everything except wash the car … but I’m working on figuring that out! 
It has so many bells, whistles, horns, and sirens that one could get easily lost in the maze of menus and never find one’s way out. However, I have mananged boil it down to a few simple controls that I use and thusly have never even visited some of the controls / menus available.
1) 90% of the time, I use aperture priority.
2) 90%+ of the time, I use what the meter says.
3) 10% of the time, I use the exposure compensation.
4) 90% of the time I use daylight white balance. If I’m shooting in morning, or evening, I still use daylight WB because I like the warm colors that I get in the morning or in the evening. I find that using Auto WB, the camera ‘corrects’ the color for me, which I don’t want. (Yeah, I know! If I shot RAW …, but I don’t!)
5) I use auto focus unless I have to use manual focus (too close, not enough contrast,confusing patterns, etc.).
6) I have 2 shooting banks set up, one for the 85% case (normal shooting), and one specifically setup for shoot sports indoors (15%) under artificial light. These banks allow me to change white balance, JPG size, etc. at a single touch of a button.
7) I only use manual mode for night shots.
When I was helping my friend, Richard, who has a Nikon D200, my goal was to boil his usuage down to a very simple set of controls. I taught him the difference between aperture priority and shutter priority, how apertures and shutter speeds work together, and when to use exposure compensation. He asked about manual mode, I told him to contact me in a year, which is probably how long it will take him to get to a place where he might actually need it!
In the end, I guess that I actually use my D2X like all of the other cameras that I’ve had through the years. I take the simplest set of controls that will work and I ignore the rest. The one thing that I really like about my D2X is the high speed shooting mode. I’ve captured a lot of good shots at 5 FPS and some at 8 FPS, as well. Overall, when I think about it, I could have gotten by with a D200, which is nothing more than a slightly stripped down version of the D2X, for less than half the cost, but at the time that I bought the camera, the D200 hadn’t yet been introduced. That said, though, I have no regrets in buying the D2X!
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