I think the ability to set templates, and apply planets to templates a little bit like the shipyard functionality would mostly alleviate this problem.

I basically run 4 types of planets at all times.

1) Full manufacturing.

2) Full science.

3) Full Econ.

4) Full science that still needs significant manufacturing to build stuff.

At the moment, once I finish my initial tech rush, I put everything into full manufacturing as the default then shift them later, but yea on 40-50-100+ planets, I can spend an hour on one turn just resorting and checking planets. It would be nice if I could just tick an AI manager box, or have templates I can assign 30 planets to at once if I want.

I would really like it if you could tell the game to auto upgrade your starbases. Perhaps give you the option to focus on production, attack or defense. Seeing as you can already tell the starbases to order constructors, it would be nice if they also used them automatically also.

I tend to build an economy starbase for all my planets, as well as all the mining starbases. I leave extra constructors on them when they get maxed out and when I research a new technology for them it gets really tedious upgrading them all one at a time. It would be nice if there was an option to have the game do that for me automatically.

Indeed a very annoying work every time a new thingy for a starbase is being researched. +1