If your people’s friends are quitting over villager production, then I am sorry to say that they would’ve quit over so much else too. And by the way, this isn’t some kind of sacred opinion being gatekept by RTS players. There are plenty of RTS games that do feature autoqueue, its just turns out that people don’t play those competitively on PC because it has massive consequences.
When neither player has to exert any effort towards villager production, they will have to spend their attention elsewhere or fall behind. So fundamentally, the game will require a player to be more hectic in their decision making and actions in order to make a difference.
Villager production is much like someone shoveling coal into a train engine. It is a mechanic that directly links to the core of your economy, and has to be maintained or the train will stop. Your efforts as the opponent can hinder him significantly to the point of forgetting to do this, which makes it a dynamic and important part of the game. Also, a tactical part of the game, as one button allows you to continuously expand your economy and gives you a “feel” of it as such.
Of course, the better a player is at multitasking, the less they need to commit mentally towards focusing on villager production, making it less important. But, most players do in fact struggle with this, and the balance within IS important. It creates a vulnerability for players to make mistakes themselves, or to be pushed towards making mistakes when under stress, while also breaking the player away from constantly having to micro everything and focusing on something more fundamental and less mentally taxing for a few seconds. A break in the gameplay loop.
The request to remove all this for “new players” is absurd. It will only hurt the experience further, demanding players to be even more active to get results on the battlefield. Moreover, it eliminates a strategic way to pressure your opponent and for them to make a mistake. Basically, with both players playing even more perfectly, there is less room for error to make the difference.
You don’t want that. Hell, personally, I think this game is too lenient when it comes to these types of mechanics, but an RTS should be chaotic with everything going wrong at all times, needing you to constantly put out fires for things to work–otherwise you will have perfect macro, and there won’t be a significant difference between you and your opponent. When this happens, the game simply becomes a complete shitshow of spamming units at each other. This is not good gameplay. This is not strategic.
Villager production is the bare minimum here. I highly suspect most complaints actually come from players being frustrated themselves that they can’t focus on it, rather than the obvious bullshit that is “think of the new players”. All I have to say to you, is that it is okay to make mistakes. That is kind of the point. Now kindly, stop trying to force autoqueue on every RTS in existence.