I definitely agree, this is actually one of the changes I'd like to see most in the game. The way I currently do it is I put the "toggle auto-fire" buttons on my mouse's thumb buttons, then you can double click it to fire those groups, but this is fairly awkward when you're managing more than 2 groups of weapons. A way to assign a button for "fire group 2" and "fire group 3" etc would be much better. They could be left unassigned as a default, but just having that as an option would make manual combat with big ships a lot smoother. Even with smaller ships I think it would make a big difference in supporting a high "skill ceiling" in the combat. Currently it's too much of a hassle for me to try to control missiles/kinetic/HE separately, so I just put kinetic on autofire, but I think I'd be able to manually control every weapon group if I could assign a firing button to each one on my thumb buttons. For example this would make it a lot easier to sneak in heavy mauler/hellbore shots when the ai drops shields to avoid a light/heavy needler burst, while simultaneously managing missiles.