Hi Eric,
I had the manual 12" truss Skywatcher dob, and while I enjoyed star hopping for a while, I really only looked for the "bright" and easy objects that I knew were there.....if you have GOTO, you simply dial up the object you want or connect the scope to a laptop and use Stellarium to drive the scope, its awesome.
One thing which you will not need any tech skills for is the alignment, enter the time, date, location (coordinates, which you can find using google maps or even your GPS enabled phone) into the hand controller and simply select ONE star alignment.....the manual tells you how.
The scope will slew to where it thinks the star should be (say Sirius - which is south of Orion) and then all you do is use the arrows on the controller to centre the view of Sirius in the eyepiece, press enter and then it should say "Alignment Successful".
Then you can use the TOUR function which will step you through the objects visible that night for the place you are and the time of night....VERY cool as it just gives you a list, you scroll through (or simply start at the beginning) and then the scope slews to the object you want, all you have to do is wait for it to beep, maybe adjust it slightly and then enjoy the views....
All quite easy and my point is, GOTO will give you HOURS of things to LOOK at rather than spend HOURS trying to find things you may not recognise in the eyepiece.....once you have tried and used GOTO, its VERY difficult to go back to manual nudge nudge nudge to keep the object you have spent time finding, in the eyepiece....
If you also want to "share" the scope so others can look at the target too, the scope will TRACK it so it will stay there for as long as you want it to.
If you want to take some (less than 30 sec shots, or video) using a webcam or other camera, then GOTO with tracking will let you do that.
So, my opinion (if you havent already guessed) is GOTO, well worth it.
Cheers
Chris