My two bobs worth...
In my company, autobrakes are recommended. In practice I tend to look at the plate, RW condition and A/C weight and pick the turn-off I'd like to take. With a little experience I find it seems to pull me up nicely!
Once down to the turn-off speed or taxi speed I simply squeeze the pedals and the autobrakes (normally) smoothly drop out with minimal heat build up. Certainly for PAX comfort I find it works well. I have no piloting experience of the John Wayne but as a passenger and speaking to the crews I understand that the Airbus low setting is not enough and the med setting is slightly too much. When positioning on them normally one feels the brakes followed a distance down the runway by a jolt as the brakes are dropped out and then manual braking with your nose up against the front seat again. Tactically it may be necessary but from a PAX comfort view I try to avoid that if possible.
Certainly the 757 brakes (steel) can be kaned and rarely go above 3 (out of 9) - they are as good as gold! Have used max braking a few times and it is very good - in fact it stopped the jet so quick, we needed to put power on to make the only turnoff about 5-600 metres into the runway! (we were empty before you ask!)
The 767 however (Carbon) can be difficult as although they slow you quickly, they do heat up and in our company we can not use the first setting due to resonance encountered when the type was introduced. If there is a short turn around, we are vacating at the end of the RW, no ATC pressures, etc I suspect it is wise to use the reversers to scrub most of the speed. However I have watched someone go for a greaser with the ensueing float and end up having to throw out the anchors to stop our pulses rising despite the RW being over 3000m - however that is of course a matter of landing technique rather than tactical use or otherwise of an automatic system.
We recently had an interesting little situation involving landing rollout and basically I do not hang about with the brakes.I select what I think I need and try to ensure I put it down in the right place on speed.After flying the nose wheel on to the deck I find the brakes spool up very smoothly (noticable on even high settings). The brakes kick in on passing 1 degree attitude on the derotation.
As an aside I understand that since it became policy to use idle reverse at our base and let the brakes do the work, the brake wear has actually decreased. Certainly the longhaul types are all carbon that work better/erode less when hot so by putting the load on them has apparently cut our wear. Just a thought...
So as you may guess, I think that autobrakes are a great little invention, along with auto speedbrake and I only wish I could have had them on the C152 when I learnt!!! ( I jest!)
Have fun chaps and chapettes,
yours aye,
Leslie!