Auto-fire isn't an AI setting though, it's a player-assist setting.
It's like complaining that your saw is a terrible hammer: Of course it is, it's not supposed to be a hammer.
If this was truly the case (which it of course isn't), why is the AI disabling my autofiring setting because my piloted ship was accidentally in the group I selected to give a tactical command to? And I thought to just have given plenty clear examples why the firing mode should not be overridden by the AI. Why ignore something useful?
I'm going to agree with Yunru, it's a player assist at start of combat setting.
The reason for your weapon selection/autofire state changing is as soon as you give your ship a tactical order, you are no longer piloting it, the autopilot is. It's not your ship anymore in terms of commands, and thus acts like any other AI ship.
If you put the ship under AI control, why would you expect it to act different from any other AI controlled ship? I personally expect it to act like an AI ship, and my guess is that would be most player's expectations. I'll note, as soon as you do anything (like select a weapon group), it goes back to being under player control, so clearly weapon group selections and autofire status are considered important for the AI to function, and if it doesn't have full control of those, will hand everything back to the player.
So here is my stab at explaining what I see is the miscommunication. There are two very distinct features being discussed here in regards to the autofire toggle on the
loadout screen, as opposed to in combat autofire status.
1) Convenience feature for the player reducing the number of shift-number button presses at the beginning of each and every fight.
2) Fine grained AI control determining when weapons fire.
I totally agree that the autofire toggle on the loadout screen does nothing for AI ships, but on the other hand, that is not its intent. It is purely a convenience for me, the player, to save on pointless repetitive motions. It means I don't have to stretch my left hand awkwardly to hit shift-7 every fight to turn my point defenses on my Onslaught or Paragon. I would object if that convenience feature was taken away by combining it with a fine grained AI control setting which has absolutely nothing to do with how I fly my flagship at the beginning of each fight.
If such a fine grained AI control were added, it should be a different toggle, as Alex suggested, or completely new screen intended for AI control stuff, and not remove features that are currently used by, I would guess, most players for flagships.
As for autofire in combat itself, it is intended to be an in combat toggle, for both the player and AI. Removing the option from the AI's pool of options seems like it could only hurt the general ship case, and breaks the symmetry between AI and player piloting, while perhaps helping some small parameter space of highly optimized loadouts. The game would likely be poorer for it (or harder, as all the default loadouts for the AI would need to be tweaked to take into account this new autofire behavior, and thus be much more optimized flux wise) and the parameter space of loadouts that are viable would shrink.
I think this feature request would need to be a new feature, and not interact with the current autofire logic and settings, but be its own new thing. It also feels like such an override of the basic AI should be hidden behind a tutorial explaining in detail what the general effects of each would have on the AI, and intended only for advanced players who understand what it's going to do to ship behavior. And not on the standard loadout screen.
In summary, changing logic to not touch autofire once set is likely easy for Alex. However, I fear there would be complicated repercussions for every single ship and combat, that would not be as easy to handle.