When I picked mine up last summer, my son (who has been driving a couple years) got in and pointed to the column shifter and asked: "What's that?"
Being a manual transmission fan...(dying breed), I don't necessarily prefer the column shift, but it's a truck. I'll probably never have the need to have 3 people in the front, but many do. The shifters today in more and more vehicles are just an electrical switch, so the engineers could be a little more creative and cost effective in their design of a "shifter" than the current column shifter though. The rotary dial on the dash of the Ram seemed a little awkward when I took one for a test drive, but I thought "why not".