Surely it hasn't escaped your notice that it's rather par for the course for Android to give users the ability to do things they way they want, whether necessary or not.

Android doesn't presume to dictate acceptable feature sets for applications; as a result, sometimes apps will do things that the user did not expect or want (which may still in fact be a valid feature of the app, or may just be a bug), and then it provides tools to allow users to identify and correct the problem if it is unacceptable for their use case. This is the pathological case, though, and not the norm. The general assumption is that the user's preferences trump the OS's, which is a large part of the reason that so many people like Android to begin with.

Of course it hasn't. You are precisely stating my point.

Android requires the user to do more work because it manages less of the experience itself and offers needless choices.

The reason so many people like Android is because it is cheap, widely available, and can be tailored to the carriers wishes. No serious commentator believes that it's because the majority of people want to manage power consumption manually.