I think you assume too much what other players would and wouldn't loathe in a game...there was a similar discussion on E-D which had a fair selection from either side of the argument.
The general consensus amongst the SC crowd is that they would like it...it's been discussed enough over the last few months. From what I can gather, you won't be hand loading every crate or item into the hold, most is done via the kiosk interface and shoved into your cargo hold by a team of handwavium forklift drivers....
There's also quite a few players who aren't interested in min/maxing their time whilst playing a game for enjoyment, grinding out missions per hour makes it no different than current popular play styles in E-D. The intention is that whilst your ship is being loaded, you'll be browsing through the SC version of Top Man store buying yourself a new T-shirt to match your weapon colours or just do other business whilst there.
Although I quite like the idea, I'd prefer it to be optional or semi automated with only the small, important DHL or Amazon type packages having to be taken aboard by hand. Some of these will have to be delivered by hand too via ground transport in cases where you can't land your ship at the point of delivery...according to recent reports anyway.
I assume too much because we have seen it how MMO can make every single unexpected shenanigans happened because players simply decided to troll, so yeah, every possible scenarios need to be under scrutiny.
Even what you mentioned about handwavium cargo bots/spawner have it's own issues, like how exactly those handwavium would happen, here is what I fear, if the handwavium is something like in other games where cargo magically spawned inside the ship cargo bay (a fair and common solution in every other games), then what if someone or something blocks that crates spawn area?
Such simple blocker is inevitable due to these absurd (for games) cargo system.
Nevermind game glitch or incompetent AI magic forklift/bot who caused that, what if it caused by other players? Or *gasp*, your own crew/friend? Or even bigger *gasp* a troll/griefer?
And then another layer of complexity in already excessive overly complicated game mechanics needed to be added just to prevent such scenario.
If we don't deal with such, expect player/crew mates/npc being crushed by magically spawned cargo, worse, it can cause ships to randomly explode during cargo loading activity (maybe you forget to empty your cargo bay before adding tons of cargo, AND... unlike on other games, in sc you can haul cargo inside your ship without the item being classified as real cargo, see that big benny vending machine transport from some pages ago, such item won't be recognized as cargo but physically occupying the ship cargo area), or worse, catastrophic system failure due to glitched physics, etc.
Is it worth it? All those complexity? Nevermind the above, for the past few years I've been anxiously waiting the day where some sc players decide to make it raining cargo crates on the busiest port scenario, just imagine olisar now and someone decide to dump HULL E sized or whatever those huge cargo container ships worth of cargo crates on olisar, effectively blocking the player entrance with cargo crates. Server crash is not unlikely, heck I'm not sure if the entire game infrastructure would even able to properly render all those crates.
Lmao.
Do you still think it's worth it?
