My main gripe with ecomanager is not that it's op, but that it gives you a type of advantage that new players are not even aware of being possible.
While I can't speak for the 2.5k gods among us, at my semi competitive level of ~2k setons there are only two actually useful, hard to replace, automation features of ecomanager:
- Making sure shields and omni never turn off in the lategame by throttling fabs, (air-)factories and construction.
- Allowing your mass fabs to run on your allies' power overflow without fear.
Integrating the second feature into the main repo would be a nice QOL change imo, but for the first one I don't really have a good idea.
In a perfect world all parts of ecomanager would be unnecessary, e.g. adding the fab throttling into the base game, banned by an easy to enforce rule, like reclaim auto-clickers, or just explicitly allowed.
Sadly, all three solutions have problems.
For one, I'm pretty certain there is no way to integrate throttling of non-fabs to always keep your shields up in a sensible way.
Having your construction pause automatically will loose you lots of games unless you know exactly how the automated logic works, and/or you being able to edit said logic directly. But automatic throttling like this is a must if you want to ensure your base doesn't die to your shields flickering from a random influx of mass while you micro your army on the other side of the map.
Banning it is also a bad idea imo. Not only would enforcement be costly and avoidance trivial (just make sure the pausing looks human enough and you have plausible deniability), I can already imagine the endless arguments about some 1k dude on dual gap having used, or not having used, ecomanager to pause their hives..
As a result, even if you want ecomanager gone (and I kinda do), I think it's not big enough of a problem for the ban route to be worth pursuing. None of the actually good players use ecomanager in tournaments after all.
As such, I think just explicitly allowing the type of automation ecomanager uses (selection, pausing and unpausing), while keeping mods that give unit movement/reclaim/attack orders banned is the least bad solution.
It's the "least bad" solution because for maps where ecomanager is useful, keeping it allowed also keeps the weird meta-skill of having to learn ecomanager, if you want to get the most out of your t3/t4 arty wars which is useful nowhere else in faf.
But having selection, pausing and unpausing explicitly allowed avoids the problems that ban or integration have, while, as a side effect, also clears up the grey zone that mods like selection prioritizer, split/disperse move and the auto-repeat feature of UI party are in.
If we combine this with having mass fab throttling as an option in the main game, now every new player also knows that something like ecomanager is possible which should significantly reduce the information gap between them and long term players.