So because your design is poor, automatic memory management sucks?
I have a question for you. If you where using manual garbage collection (ie. had to free objects yourself), how would you do that without a live reference to the object? If all your sprites where in a list, and you removed the reference to that list, how would you get at the sprites to free them? Answer: You couldn't. The Automatic GC can. It ensures that nothing is freed until you're absolutely finished with it (thus no more rogue pointers, YAY).
How can this possibly be a bad thing?
I have a question for you. If you where using manual garbage collection (ie. had to free objects yourself), how would you do that without a live reference to the object? If all your sprites where in a list, and you removed the reference to that list, how would you get at the sprites to free them? Answer: You couldn't. The Automatic GC can. It ensures that nothing is freed until you're absolutely finished with it (thus no more rogue pointers, YAY).
How can this possibly be a bad thing?