This certainly does seem to be an emotional issue for many.
It's a purely practical issue in landscape photography - if one is obsessive about one's art or hobby, buys $10K+ equipment and enlarges to large sizes, one needs to be aware that AF may not cut it, and use checks and workarounds.
I think this is first a question of design parameters and test conventions. Camera and lens designers design the camera AF path and EACH lens servo control for certain purposes. But they don't publish those specs. People like DxO will typically test a lens/AF system at a multiple of the focal distance, eg 50x which for a 50 mm will give you 2.5m. Any precision and repeatability issues at long distance won't show up on those test reports.
As a result, that portrait lens with the superb test results may never deliver at long distances, in practice.
Try the following: Wait for the evening, pick your favorite short tele eg. 85mm, walk to the side of a road, point the tele along the road at a roadsign 50m or so away, and take a few pics. You'll be surprised at what ends up being and not being in focus. The only photo course I ever took in my life was a one-hour Xrite-sponspored walk at Photokina. The instructor said "always shoot the hell out of it because of AF". He was right.
My friend Norman Koren who runs Imatest learnt this lesson very painfully one day when he tried to take landscape images in Paris with a 5D2 and kit lens. He laughed when I warned him, he was very angry when he saw his pictures.
Frankly, I think the only focus that is GUARANTEED to work at long ranges is directly geared manual focus with an enlarged liveview. Oh wait, that is exactly what the cinema geeks, tech cam guys and CMOS dSLR owners with MF lenses are doing. At medium distance, good cameras are often pretty good. Or not.
Edmund
PS. As I wear a tinfoil hat, I think one of the reasons modern AF lenses focus so badly at infinity is that manufacturers don't want people using the crop feature to zoom, they want them to buy the longer lens where they make lotsa profit. But that's just the cynic in me speaking.