I agree on the max selection count, but disagree on the implementation. I already have plans to show the HPs, EPs and other locally stored resources as a line on the icon of each unit selected (or in some other visualized fashion, perhaps even darkening the image when their health is lower). I think we need the ability to select or deselect units by clicking or control-clicking on their icons in the selection area. Thus, left-click selects only that unit (removes all others from the selection), ctrl-left-click removes that unit from the selection and perhaps a double click will cause the same thing to happen when you double click a unit in the 3d area, selects all units of the same type within a certain radius, and that can also be modified by shift, so that other units not of that type that are already selected aren't de-selected. I'm not hard-set on that exact specification yet, but that's pretty much what I'm planning on (I think part of it is documented in the bug database).
Personally, I'm in favor of the current 4x4 (or similar) grid of icons but to begin squishing and/or stacking them after more than 16 units are selected much like a deck of cards when spread out on a table, but still overlapping.
As far as auto-repair, it certainly wont be getting thrown out. Enabling or disabling it as an option in the game settings (set when starting the game) isn't something I'm opposed to, but removing very useful functionality because a few people don't like it is hardly sensible. When playing a RTS game, I would personally prefer to focus on important things like how I plan to beat the other guy rather than mundane maintenance. The idea of an RTS is that the player is the supreme commander, they should be bothered with as few of the "mundane" details as possible. I do concede that the auto-repair functionality can take away some of the duties a player of the game previously would have to attend to, but not excessively. For example, you wouldn't military units to stand by idly and watch as an enemy starts attacking your town, you would want them to automatically attack them to defend, so this is also an "auto" command. By queueing commands, you can make the most efficient use of workers, and auto-repair helps to keep them busy when one would have otherwise allowed workers to become idle.
Perhaps a repair command should have an <allow-auto value="true|false"/> to explicitly disable auto-repair in a mod? As a side-note, "repair" is internally being renamed to "replenish" in 0.3 because it also applies to EPs and locally stored resources and all skills can optionally have a cost to HPs or a resource that is stored either locally or globally instead of just EPs (as is currently the case), so some of these dynamics are changing.
