While I generally agree with the sentiment, I would like to offer a counter-argument from a perspective of a man who plays Elite not for the features, not for the content, but specifically because he enjoys the act of flying the spaceship. Here goes:
Not everything needs to be a button. It's true that not everything needs to be a chore, either, but the game cannot fully transform into a button-pressing simulator.
Just like with asking for the docking permission - it could easily be a button. But some things need to retain a tiny bit of involvement if for nothing else than to break the monotony. It doesn't have to be much, but keeping some things to be a procedure instead of a simple button press keeps the illusion that you are operating a spaceship going.
The sad but important thing to realize, that this is all this game is about. An illusion. And one has to evaluate whether this core thing is still appealing to him or not. Once you lose your illusion of flying a spaceship, once the act of getting your bunch of pixels from certain bunch of pixels to another bunch of pixels turns into boredom so you want to replace it with a button press so you don't have to focus on it and can do other things, the game is lost to you.
There's no shame in that. But it IS so.
Things like docking computers and flight assists alone are already bordering with it. But once you can't even be bothered to perform four clicks to set your game to play itself and want to replace it with just one? I don't know man. Maybe it's too late.
