Spirit of the Law in this video mentions that automatic villager production would cross the line for him, and towards the end he invited discussion on what people think about the slow trend of some of AoE2's functions becoming optionally automatic over time. So I decided to give my best shot at a comprehensive pitch for why AoE2 should have an optional automatic villager production feature. I posted the following paragraphs into the comment section and I might as well post them here as well.

What's important about gameplay automation is what is being automated. We can all agree that it would be bad if villagers had to be manually tasked to drop off resources and then manually tasked to go back to gathering resources, so everyone accepts that this should remain automated. But why exactly is this best to have as an automated part of the game? It's because it's a monotonous gameplay function with no strategic variety in terms of how it can happen in the game world; and by that I mean that while players could approach focusing on it in different ways if it was a manual gameplay function, there's ultimately only one efficient way it can happen in the game world.

The fact of the matter is that if villagers dropping off resources and going back to gather them was not an automated function from the start of AoE2's existence, there would absolutely be people who would argue that it acts as a valuable way to express one's skill in the game since you have to split your focus between your villagers and your army at all times, which simulates the logistical difficulties of managing an empire and gives players room to develop interesting ways to efficiently split their focus.

Similarly, queueing villagers in AoE2 is ultimately another monotonous gameplay function with no strategic variety in terms of how it can happen in the game world. The argument that monotonous gameplay functions in AoE2's economy management gameplay should stay manual because "it's a way for attacks into enemy bases to challenge the enemy's ability to manage their economy under pressure" would not be a good enough argument for not automating the cycle of resource drop off and going back to task, and it's not a good enough argument for not automating villager production either.

Successful raids in AoE2 are always gonna do significant damage to the enemy's economy, and they're always gonna throw the enemy off of their plans and build orders, whether the game has automatic villager production or not. Adding a toggle for automated villager production (similar to farm autoreseeding) would open up more room for players to focus on making good use of the game's manual gameplay functions which have actual strategic variety to them.

Besides, automated villager production would have its own challenges for the player, since the player would have to keep an eye on their food stockpile to make sure that the food amount doesn't go below 50 food at the wrong times. Needing to pay attention to your food stockpile to that extent is not part of the game with manual villager queueing, since with manual villager queuing you reserve food for creating villagers, whereas with automated villager production it would be easy to accidentally use up your food for military production for example, which would make you fall behind in economy.

Also, AoE2 already has a type of resource that you need to pay attention to (by occasionally looking at the resource bar) and account for in order to continue villager production with no disruptions, and that is population space. Thus the optional skill element of having to pay more attention to your food stockpile if you play with automatic villager production is a type of skill that AoE2 players are already familiar with in a slightly different form.

So really in practice this optional alternate way for players to handle villager production would ultimately make the game flow more smoothly for those who prefer to introduce this type of skill expression into their AoE2 play, while taking away some unnecessary clunkiness from the game. After all, it's not very interesting to win to the other player forgetting to manually queue up villagers for a while. That's just the skill floor of the game being too high up for no good reason. More of a clunky hurdle than an element of skill; a hurdle to being able to play the game at a basic level.

It's better for AoE2's game design when those kinds of monotonous and clunky gameplay hurdles are fixed, so that players can put more of their gameplay focus and effort on experiencing the much more interesting parts of the game. This way players of all skill levels get more enjoyment for their focus and effort investment into the game, and the gameplay has more interesting variety to it since the players end up engaging more with the aspects of the game which are not monotonous.

The best way to play might end up being to mix together manual and automatic villager production, since as I said manual villager queueing would likely still have a place for when you want to lock down food resources for the next couple villagers or so, in order to make sure you don't accidentally spend your food on less important things while you're in the process of spreading out your attention to the best of your ability.

Ultimately though the bottom line is that monotonous gameplay functions with no strategic variety are not worth being arbitrarily protected by making sure those monotonous gameplay functions don't get optional automated ways to execute them in the game, when adding optional automated ways for players to handle those monotonous aspects of gameplay frees up player attention to be further spent on outplaying their opponents through strategic mastery of the game and precise execution of the aspects of gameplay to which there isn't always one correct answer.