Factory manager

[Frankschtaldt]

I highly doubt it ever would. IMO you would be hard pressed to find an AI that is more efficient than a human manually micromanaging everything. (Unless its something extremely straightforward, which predicting sales and production numbers certainly isnt)

Okay, true that. I was more think of it from the point of view of someone who is happy to allow an automated system to manage their factories are significantly less likely to micromanage things to the degree that the suggested system would. That is, they would most likely (like me) focus in making sure enough cars were sold with only the vaguest of attention paid to making sure that production is kept as close as possible to where the sales are.
I keep my factories close to London and New York with one or two outliers to feed the more distant cities but I have no intention of carefully tallying up sales of each model in each city and then matching up each factories production to take full advantage of that information and I find it hard to believe you would find many players that would. Those few players that would happily spend 1-2 hours every turn micromanaging their factories to that degree would never use an automated system like the one I suggested because they could do it better. But, all the other mortal players like me would save a hell of a lot of money on freight using that factory manager I suggested.

Ive found people just do anyway.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
People will complain about including such systems you are 100% correct there. However, people will also complain if they are not
included!
Reading reviews on that Distant Woulds game and most of them (that I've seen anyway) list the automated systems as a positive and a few of them focus a bit on how well implemented they are.
At the end of the day it's a design choice Eric has to make. Most people (in my experience) will not stop playing a game because there is a feature in it they don't like as long as it's optional. They'll complain about it no end (good publicity I say!!) but but they'll play it. Compulsory features (either can't turn off or can't turn on. Either hard coded or simply perceived as compulsory) on the other hand WILL stop people playing if they get on their nerves enough.