customization - when and how?

I wish consumer electronics were designed to let you customize how they worked a little bit better. A great example is the "High ISO" option that most cameras have these days. It's nice to have a mode where the camera automatically boosts the ISO so that your photos are not too blurry. But that boost comes at cost, which is grainy and desaturated photos. I wish that my camera had the option where I could set what the maximum ISO boost would be. For instance, ISO 800 looks like crap on my SD850IS, while ISO 400 isn't too bad. But the high ISO mode is happy to go all the way to 800, even when I personally think 400 would do. Let me decide how much noise I'm willing to have in my pictures! Yes, I could set the ISO manually, but it's a pain to do this for each and every shot.