Interesting thoughts here in this thread... I'll try to add what I mean to know with my non-technical English vocabulary:
In general it depends a lot on the isolation provided by the housing, the thermal conductivity and the mass of the heater (combined with the wattage the power source can deliver) to answer the question which of both ways is more energy saving, turning off or maintaining temps between hits.
Since the heater of the crafty hasn't a large heat capacity I would think heating up doesn't consume much power and perhaps even less than maintaining temp, too. But this is not what I experienced with the pretty weak power source so far after 6 month of stealth usage. Every time I have to interupt a session for some minutes I loose quite a lot batterie power if resuming several times before killing a bowl. The very long heat up time is already an indicator for the heavy power consumption in relation to the weak battery and the quite powerful heater.
The grasshopper, the MFLB , the elevape, the Pax 2 and as best example the herbalizer and of course any other vape with very short heat up time generally posses a heater with a very small mass and a small heat capacity combined with powerful energy sources. Those vapes could (or even must) turned off and they'll cool down as fast they're heating up. Most large desktop vapes with solid heaters are just behaving the opposite way like the MV, the Plenty, the cloud Evo, the e-nano. Better leave them turned on since the heater doesn't consume much power once its heated to a preset temperature. Best example here is the plenty: it does very clearly stop heating in intervals. Much unscientific talk from my side for not so much information, so please correct me if I made a logical mistake... I don't really know if what I wrote above makes really sense.
To come to an conclusion:
Like some of you already said time in between hits is the biggest factor with the crafty. Imo if someone makes a big break between drawing and the unit would shut off by itself anyways, why wasting the 1 minute of energy until the auto-shut off jumps in. If you are constantly hitting like every 1-2 minutes or better every 30 seconds I wouldn't let the unit power off by itself since I have the impression the battery is drained faster if I let the unit cool down more often.
I think what S&B meant in the manual is, when you finished a session, reload or you are making a break for more than 1 minute, better power down manually what seem obvious than letting the unit run without drawing anymore in your pocket until the auto shut off jumps in.
@UnshavenFish , I hope this doesn't sound to weird. I am baked, but I don't have the force to re-write this passage tomorrow since I'll probably will be medicated again...
The battery pass-through, the technical semantics behind and the consequences for battery life and charging cycles had been discussed in the mighty thread. Iirc there wasn't a general consensus but a lot of interesting and sophisticated informations from members with technical knowledge about pass-through and power managements. Definitely worth a quick look!
@UnshavenFish magic eraser = melamine foam. You are cleaning with tiny scratches.
Isn't polishing a surface the same thing?