I rather like on guard, chemical warfare, and death from above for autocast. As for short sharp stick I think an autocast would not really work for it after all as you need to couple it with smart movement otherwise it's useless. I don't think some of them are more powerful on autocast as the autocast AI will probably not target as smartly as the player. Aside from that I agree greatly with your comments. While it's not the most important thing to do, something to help when you have large multi-unit forces and need to trigger abilities of tons of different units would be really nice and these are the abilities that I find I use (almost) every fight anyway (often with randomish targeting because so they can influence the fight before it's over as units tend to die quickly on normal or above speed).
