First off, it took me 15 seconds to figure out that BFN meant Battle for Naboo lol, everyone else just says Naboo, Speeder, Krayt.
Second, I agree about the sim option. I mean, I don't mind playing the raid manually, especially if I think I can get a higher score. In fact, I'm slowly relicing my teams to try and get the max individual score, just for a sense of achievement. It just becomes exhausting when you have to do a single battle over a dozen times because of lousy hero bonuses, ridiculous enemy modifiers or just too much RNG in general. Example, for me this is best seen with the Maul+Sid+Nute team, I understand the strategy behind it (ramping up criticals to stack Maul and Sidious' offense), but between the enemy taking an ungodly amount of turns from base speed alone (my mods on that team aren't god-tier, but they aren't lousy by any means either), constantly taking bonus turns because of the enemy modifier (especially in cases where I get stuck behind DDK), and Maul's underwhelming hero bonus, I end up spending over an hour on that one team. Then, when you take into account the avalanche of other battles and events you have to work on (TB, GAC, TW, Conquest, etc.), and whether or not they have similar issues (e.g., I enjoy GAC, but the moment I find the opponent has several GLs on defense, all with ridiculous DCs, I suddenly start getting depressed), plus any possible real-life responsibilities (school, work, family, etc.) and activities (hobbies), it just becomes too much.
Can't fully agree on your last point, though. On the speeder bike raid. Almost half the time I put a team on auto, I ended up getting 30% or less of the max possible score because the enemy just kept ganging up on one toon at a time, especially when said toon has much less survivability compared to everyone else. Not that that doesn't happen on manual play as well, but I digress. That whole raid was a mess in terms of mechanics anyways. I think my favorite so far from the new system is the Krayt raid. There were new and unique mechanics (the swallowing your toons and then going underground thing), but even then they were easy to understand, the hero bonuses actually made a difference, even when I went in with G10-11 Jawas (yes, I had to restart a few times, but I was still capable of getting the max 300k). My only actual issue was that it ran too often, and even that they ended up fixing later on.