It's definitely a learning exercise at the beginning and feels awkward. Some of the older videos on my channel have games without hotkey usage and I think there's a pretty big difference.
Having to handhold the fabs to get them to be somewhat conscious is awful as well. Standing orders are a thing in militaries for exactly this reason. It's understood that every unit has something it should be doing unless something else is taking priority.
APM demands are a bug that should be patched out for lore reasons. This is why RTS isn't popular. It's just needless repeated chores. It would be like playing chess requiring you to carve your pieces before play each time. If something is best practice it needs to be automated. They added templates for a reason and then apparently dumped the logic behind even including them. I've felt this way since total annihilation. I simply do not understand this self flogging nature of gamers. Especially rts players. Heart breaking.
Couple purposes. The most common one is to build them with the RAS (resource allocation system) preset to continue building your economy after you have all your mexes upgraded to T3. RAS support commanders generate 10 mass and 900 energy so you can keep scaling. Rambo presets are pretty strong and like mini experimentals. And there are a lot of other fun uses like teleporting and sacrificing for GC, etc. They're a really flexible unit.
They are really useful for reclaiming on the front line. Since reclaim can give you up to 81% of the mass back for units killed this can really up your game
