I have the same conclusion as you two. I "learned" piano (in my tadpole years) without ever touching the pedal. Of course I don't know how I sounded back then, probably horrible, but still, my fingers did all the note sounding. During my first six months as a re-beginner I started from scratch, no pedal, and again my fingers had to do all the work in tying all the notes together.
Then when I started to learn about the pedal, there was a price to pay: as soon as I stopped using it, I found that I had become lazy - move the fingers to the next position without hardly even touching the previous note. As a result the pedal suddenly made my playing choppy and sloppy. In fact this happened with my current blues lesson even.
Now I try to alternate - play a passage a few times with the pedal, and then without to see if I am not clipping the notes too much. Sometimes it is unavoidable with a big jump, but mostly it is just a matter of discipline.
WieWaldi Funny thing is, the pedal timing starts to be kind of automatic
This is true! Or, as Bart would say, at some point we lose the need to constantly look at the pedal markings and the ears take over. When I practice a bar with pedal, I now hear how bare it is, or too echo-y, and I can fine-tune my foot now to make it sound better. It even works with the grace notes, surprisingly. When it happens automatically, it's such a great feeling 
pace, but steady does it... I'm now adding the grand finale at last. Well, only the first part so far. Probably one more week for the longest lesson in history... for me 
It's entirely different from the stuff we do in the Alfred books and in some ways I am finding the repeats rather hard to learn. It almost seems like a completely new pattern with each change of the right hand! It takes me quite a while to have it run semi automatically so that I can concentrate on the right hand more. But that might just be my perception. And as you said, once you practise it long enough, it does become more automatic.
