If I may, let me respond to that as primarily a music producer.
I don’t use a ton of automation. I use a lot of clip gain, a lot of group bussing with compression that creates its own type of pre mixing and various other means and methods in my workflow of achieving what I’m looking for in the Final Mix.
Consequently, I don’t begin the whole automation process at a single point in time. I engage automation 1 channel or a few channels at a time as needed and only use automation on probably a third of my tracks. In the meantime I need to be able to freely move any other channel anywhere I want in a mystical, musical workflow creative process which means without automation. Finding initial balances is an ongoing process in this case.
At no point do I want to write initial parameters for the whole project. So what would be involved is an additional step every time I engage automation on a channel. Not unlivable, however it’s just one more fiddly thing I’d rather not deal with when I’m in that headspace. I’m not trying to be picky it’s just that when I’m in the moment mixing a hit pop song I am in a creative mode no different than when I’m hyper focused on giving an instrumental performance on a bass or keyboard or whatever. I guess that’s very different than post and dialogue and all the other stuff I don’t do.
So, not a deal-breaker. But also not desirable as a requirement to work on the world’s finest DAW. How would making that process properly self-managed for us end users at some point over the several years it has been complained about be a negative?