Thinking about this thread, I looked on eBay for a cheap autofocus camera, which is sort of tricky - I wanted a mju II, but they all go for a bit more than I was willing to spend on an impulse curiosity purchase, at least until I get paid.
However in the end I did pick up an Olympus IS-1000 for £5 plus P&P. I think IS stands for Integrated System - it is an SLR with a built in 35-135mm / f4.5-5.6 lens, plus AE obviously, AF, intelligent flash, DX and a few extra modes. It's really quite an impressive beast, at least for the daytime - f4.5 is a bit slow for me, but 35-135 is pretty flexible, and you can also "Power Focus" manually as well as do aperture-priority and manual aperture/exposure if you want to.
The AF is quite fast, if not as fast as my digital, but only in quite contrasty situations with vertical lines. Again, fine in the daytime, but I like to poke around in dark corners, and there's no ground glass or split viewfinder to help you manually focus.
I've ended up feeling a bit sorry for the IS. It's a versatile camera which isn't completely dumbed down, but nobody is going to buy one now apart from weird eBay people like me - it doesn't have any retro chic, looking pretty much like a long digital, it's not "lomo quirky", it isn't particularly compact, and it doesn't have the lens choice of a standard SLR. I shall try to use it a lot to make it feel better. (It would be a good "wandering around" camera for city walks I think, with that level of zoom.)
So maybe "too high tech" is "when you feel sorry for it for trying so hard just at the time when digital was coming in". I don't know whether I should really be buying cameras because I feel sorry for them.