The autopilot is purely gameplay reasons..... the reality is if we make it as far into the future as ED and we have the tech of ED then no one will be manually flying ships, it will all be fully automated.
pretty rubbish for a game however so the lore was meant to be that all forms of high level AI including autopilot are banned. auto docking is allowed because it is not really AI but more a piece of software which connects to the space station and allows them to guide our ship in (in the design days the plan was for basic station not to support it, or for stations under attack to have such features damaged etc.
of course like so many things final implementation was massively simplified, and then recently the whole thing forgotten about as autopilot has now been added - or at least a large part of it.
The UI is clunky as hell and as the game gets more features it gets more and more complicated, a shame really but like you say the game needs to be playable on console..
Some of it is purely the games players fault however... Take blackmarkets.
at the start of the game you would not know if a black market was there until you got to a station. Dont get me wrong, hugely bare bones, the plan was for blackmarkets to only show up once we had made contacts who told us where we were and we would go and find them on hidden asteroid bases etc.. and there would be a chance they could be sting operations or they would get closed down etc.
but at launch at least you did have to find them. Players complained however and so now they advertise for the whole world to see..... a bit like a crystal meth lab advertising on the classifieds board in tescos for goodness sake.
this was done by popular demand from the player base!