We do a TON of work manually and I promise there's a lot of personal touch. :3 Lots. We don't use the first 3 ranks as personal touches or notes. To get past those ranks will require manual control. It's mainly been an influx of new or returning players that need the most rank/note maintenance, which is okay, we're happy to give them a home they can enjoy and learn at their own pace while providing a friendly atmosphere and events they can still partake in.
The website was completely empty when I joined and now it's prettied up, filled with tons of guides (written by me and another member), many different sections with lots of information on various topics for newbies as well as experienced players, links to ESO Fan sites with great information and as much of our own as we can add. This is a never ending process as we always strive to add more information and guides while expanding our event + community sections.
We also have a big pve and event section which is where we'd like to focus more of our attention. We do a lot of work for the guild whether it's on the website or crafting sets non stop for people to the point we hardly get to play ourselves. The reason our guild is growing so fast, as all our applicants tell us, is that they can see how much we care and all the love that goes into the guild.
We already do it all manually and having an add-on handle just the notes and the most basic promotion/demotion aspects will have zero affect on a personal touch. We had extras officers in the past but demoted them as they didn't actually do anything and we have a good number of officers at the moment. We'd essentially be promoting officers purely for doing notes if we did promote to help.
I'm not asking for a guild to automate playing, just something to help manage notes and ranks as we give every single person who joins a note, every person who gets demoted or promoted, or MIA's etc. If someone gets promoted up just 1 rank, we note the new rank + date. If they MIA for too many days, we put them in a sleeper state again with date, or if they were new (initiate) we tag them saying they need to restart initiate status so we know not to blindly promote based on time in guild.
We put each thing in their notes so we can always see who should be promoted.
As for why you wouldn't feel comfortable in an automated note/rank, I can't really understand that. If someone gets promoted to a certain rank for being there for x amount of days, why would that bother you? Weird. Anything past a certain rank needs to be done manually anyways which is where we'd like to focus - events, social activities, helping others get things done, or if they earned fast tracking to promotion etc.
Sorry if any of this doesn't flow, I moved pieces around and re-worded them a lot.