but Jesus the micromanaging sucked ass.

I think that that started pretty early-on. I remember reading that Blizzard intentionally put limits on the number of concurrently-selected units as a design decision in Starcraft to create more load for a player in making use of larger unit groups.

But yeah, I'm not a huge fan of micromanagement in video games. Even more obnoxious, IMHO, is micromanagement in grand strategy games, where the amount of stuff you need to deal with can become enormous. Just kills my ability to focus on executing a strategy with one particular unit if you're not going to see it for ages because you're off having to do a million things with other units.