Consider me one of those who think it's sporty. In fact I love driving a standard. It's far more fun and I love the instant power it provides.
When you are cruising at highway speed in your automatic and you decide to hit the gas, it takes what seems to me, forever, for the auto transmission to guess the correct gear downshift and then finally you have the power. This might only be a second or 2 but it's 1 or 2 seconds too long for me. In my car I downshift and then when I hit the gas pedal, imagine this, the car is instantly accelerating. It's unbearable for me to drive an auto car any more.
You can make an argument for paddle shifters and or modern dual clutch auto, but for my money the stick shift is more fun, even if not faster in every situation.
Also my car has a cool little feature for taking off on an incline that automatically prevents rollbacks for a couple seconds when starting off.