There are some fairly prominent people promoting autoflowers as the perfect solution for growers with space limitations, and I suspect the "ease" of a plant that will start flowering on its own appeals. Also, I recall at least one of those prominent people pushing 24/7 lighting of autoflowers, to maximize growth in the allotted time? More light/More growth = better, right?
Obviously the counter-argument is that you could simply run photoperiod seeds on 12/12 from the get go and run start-to-finish in a similar amount of time.