@NightHawk:
It's a kind of safety net, making sure that all games will *eventually* finish. Before the autoboot was created, games could stall indefinitely. For instance, if two players go "missing" at the same time vote-to-boot doesn't work, since you need one of them to be able to boot the other.
Essentially, the universal autoboot ensures all games have an autoboot, even the ones originally created without one.