I have worked without a drive, but it slows things down to have to keep checking that the object is still centered, it is hard to use high magnification on those objects that warrant it, and it is difficult to talk people through from bright stars to faint fuzzies, if the content and location of the field is always changing. I focus with my glasses on, and tell everybody else to leave theirs on, too. There is no one correct eyepiece position for an audience that includes little kids and potential basketball players, but I would rather have an eyepiece on the high side, with a short ladder handy for people who need it. It is usually no problem for folks to step up, but elderly people may have difficulty bending to a low eyepiece position, and people dressed in expensive or constraining clothes may not want to kneel or stoop. I thought that maybe you'd like to see what it's like, pushing one of these telescopes close to its limits.
People seem to find that intriguing.
Toward the end of the evening, I tried out a new eyepiece. At the 28x that it delivered, I could see a good deal of nebulosity in the Pleiades, not just the Merope Nebula. I also tried it with an Orion UltraBlock filter in the optical path, and was rewarded with lovely views of the east and west arcs of the Veil Nebula, and of the North American and Pelican Nebulae, too. I'll have to do an Enormous Eyepiece Evaluation Extravaganza at some future date.