Oh really? Does this particular problem come up any time other than when you move a stack? No. It's only when you move a stack of fleets that this becomes a problem.
Actually, yes, it does. Fleets or individual ships - as I've said several times now, thank you for reading - it doesn't matter, in either case they only move sporadically if you ask to more more than one at a time.
Would the game be better if this was fixed? Certainly. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying your sense of proportion is distorted.
So the whole purpose of your posts in this thread was to say, "Yes, you're right, but I think I'll argue about it anyway"?
My sense of proportion isn't distorted. This is like when you've got an itch - for the first few seconds it's just an annoyance, but if you have to ignore it because you're doing something, it starts to get more and more irritating until you absolutely have to do something about it.
Well, I and everyone else have dealt with this your "workaround" way, that is, moving every ship and fleet in our entire armada one unit at a time, for several years now, and that itch is really starting to irritate. It's not so much a matter of it being a huge deal, like the game crashing randomly, it's a matter of it being an obvious glaring flaw in one of the most fundamental parts of the game, and it being completely ignored by the developers even though they themselves must know about it.
This bug makes movement in general a pain in the ass. You try to form a fleet, so you say "you three go here" and either:
1) The three you selected
2) One of the three you selected
3) One of the three you selected and the other two on the following turn
is what moves, and you might do the same thing on the next turn and get a different result. It's nonsense. I spend more time and effort fighting with this game's movement and selection interface than I spend fighting actual enemy empires.
And what's the deal with ships set to Guard constantly coming off Guard? You move a ship somewhere, tell it to guard, hit "Turn" and now the game takes that ship off guard and expect you to give it an order... Maybe I just wanted it to sit there.
Then there's auto-explore...
Why do so many of these tiny things that cannot possibly have gone unnoticed get ignored, and yet so many things nobody has ever asked for and which have no effect on gameplay get done?
It's like, every time there's a patch... woo memory usage is down 30 percent, from 9 mb to 6 mb. Yay, I can play at grandma's house now! Ships have more colorful textures, unending bliss! Planets look... different... my life is complete! Things rotate, I can die happy now!
These things are all well and good but they've got to take a back seat to gameplay. Instead things like auto-explore become like an inside joke, newbies come and complain about it and you just laugh because everyone knows it's broken, it's a pain in the ass, and you know it's probably not going to get fixed... but is there any reason why, besides that it hasn't been done yet? Maybe all the assclowns who say "BIGAR LAZERS!!!111eleven CARIERS!!! WE NEEED CLOKING!!!" are just being louder than you are?