I feel the same ways as the OP! It's been a while since I really enjoyed playing GW. Now I force myself to play because of the shortage of resources (mostly ship credits), and it's just not fun anymore.
I thought about what can be done, and remembered some games where you can send your troops and it shows the "success rate" of the battle. So, if you send them with a success rate that you don't like, for exemple 50%, you could go to the battle yourself and try your way to beat this. This ways it's not a GW sim ticket, you actually have to think a bit about your strategy (because even in a 100% success rate your team could get hurt a bit, and the success would decline), but you could just send your squads and don't waste as much time as you do now.
I mean, it's actually similar to what we have today, since you can enter and "auto" the battle with almost the same results, but this way you can skip the time it takes to win the battle and the "retreat and try again over and over until good rng". It would be more dynamic for those without time, and even for those that only want to test some squads against a certain composition, but are tired of the same full G12 GK zarris comp everyday.