Chiming in on the side that if the battlescape is too boring, then the game probably isn't your forte. The battlescape is the game. If you take that out and autoresolve everything, I can't see where the game is even remotely exciting. I know, to each his own, and they certainly want everyone they can to enjoy themselves to grow the community, but it just seems awkward.
That said, I do see their point that most battle maps are too repetitive, and the base maps were big and played out mostly the same way... especially if you lay all your bases out the same way. There needs to be more randomness in them, with different tactics to make things a bit more interesting. Thinking back on XCOM, base defenses were often exciting because the aliens wouldn't always do everything the same way. They varied their pathing and you had to be pretty careful about them sneaking up behind you. You could force them into predictable patterns, but that required some planning.
And thinking back on XCOM again... you didn't have an autoresolve option, yet we loved it and played through them all.
The best maps to me were the small, quick open fire shootouts that had the most suspense in them. I enjoyed the city hunts and base maps, but again, aliens tended to always show up in the same place. I only hit this map once in my last game, but there was one small city map that had about 12 aliens in it who just kept coming. I think that was my favorite map.
