“No. You point first, then you focus, then you shoot, and IF your object stays relatively stationary so your focus is still good you can keep shooting, but if they move you need to re-focus.”
You can add all the extra steps you want, but here’s what I’m pulling out of your post: fancy camera operators shoot after they point. That is, they point and shoot. Therefore, they, too, use point-and-shoot cameras. You add in this extra step, namely focusing, which for the purposes of the discussion I could care less about. Why? Because it hardly matters that people used to have to focus their cameras. It doesn’t change the fact that people still have to point and shoot, just like they did in the past.
You focus on focusing, so why not make that the focal point of what so-called “point and shoot” cameras should be called? As you say, easier cameras used to be called auto-focus. Why did that stop? Apparently, from your version of events, because they became more automatic. Which, forgive me, seems like more of a reason to call them automatic than previous auto-focus cameras.
Those extra steps are the difference in camera type. Here let’s make an easy list.
Steps involved in taking a picture with and old fashioned all manual camera:
1 - set presets (speed, aperture etc)
2 - point
3 - focus
4 - shoot
Steps for auto-focus camera:
1 - set presets
2 - point
3 - shoot
Steps for point-and-shoot camera
1 - point
2 - shoot
And that’s also why the auto-focus name got dropped. Auto-focus and point-and-shoot are actually two different types of cameras with two different sets of steps to take a picture.