I thought there was a manual cross-tie on the Columbia but I could be wrong since it has been awhile.
There is. An ALT failure in the Columbia means tha battery for that bus will take the load - to get it onto the other alternator you have to hit the cross-tie switch. A cross-tie check is part of the pre-flight checks where you switch of each alternator in turn. Cirrus is simpler than Columbia in that respect. That is what I meant with "fair enough, but I don't want to do a cross-tie check as part of every pre-flight and would like an automatic failover".
The Cirrus does not have a BAT2 charge / discharge indication, so if it starts boiling and dies in flight AND the ALT2 then fails this will be the first thing you know about it. Pretty low risk and you still have ALT1, so that really just a niggle. It is one of these legacy things - the design was for a mini-BAT2 and mini-ALT2 on its own essential bus. Now that BAT2 and ALT2 have grown up this bus design is just a hangover. The Columbia was a symmetric dual-bus design from the start and better than in some twins (DA42, anyone?). Does it matter? Not really, both have good redundancy.
G1000 vs. Avidyne is a neverending other debate. Perspective fixes a few of the poor ergonomics aspects of the G1000 - in particular around page selection. Also the keypad is more ergonomic than the std. G1000 keypad, but it has NO redundancy because all AP controls are gone from the PFD/MFD. Avidyne is easier to use and the ARC-mode on the EHSI is actually useful - used it all the time except for ADF/RMI practice - complete rubbish in the G1000.
And don't you get annoyed with having to switch fuel tanks every once in awhile... I don't understand why they didn't include a both selector in such an advance aircraft...
because the engine is above the fuel ports in the tanks, and so is the engine-driven fuel pump. That means that the engine "sucks" fuel from the tanks (I leave it to the pedants to point out that it lowers pressure and outside air pressure actually pushes the fuel) and if both tanks were connected to the pump, as soon as one fuel port in the tanks sucks air this is it - you will not feed reliably from the other tank. Different in gravity-fed high wing thingies such as Cessnas. You could of course fit dual fuel pumps in/below each tank...
more than 10 Gallons imbalance and there is problem
And that is the case in any aircraft with large fuel tanks. Turbo Saratoga or Arrow no different, except they did not make it a limitation during certification - probably not required back then. Just fly along for a couple of hours in a PA32R-301T without switching tanks and your arm will become tired...