this is the usual situation of bad controls, and with the expected usual excuse of "but there is nothing better to do ingame so its ok" from pros, imo if there is nothing better to do in the game at start than manually clicking rocks, then that's the game itself being bad in beginning in general, outsourcing gameplay to osu simulator doesn't fix the early gameplay, it just makes it annoying to those that don't enjoy clickspamming miningame and gives advantage to those who are good at it (but not necessarily at the game itself) over them, and like said in the op, additional advantage to those who memorized the map reclaim positions and optimal reclaim paths to then execute at start of the game like a recital of memorized text paragraph, there is zero excuse for bad controls that manual reclaim is
anyways for the solution, is it possible to get engineers to retarget reclaim beam automatically (from attack move) as fast as they do when given reclaim order queue manually? ik it would likely ruin the sim speed but it would close the gap between the 2 a bit without any major changes, at least make the engineer consider the next reclaim target while it is reclaiming the current target so it can retarget as soon as it is done without standing there and looking around for almost a full second between auto-reclaims while the manually queued one speedruns the reclaim for no apparent reason