Build orders are mandatory to play AoE2 or Starcraft competitively.
Well... I think any competitive game is always going to involve some level of fine-tuning and routine that may feel tedious, especially since competitive games by their nature should minimize randomization. And it's hard to prevent a build order without introducing RNG, the most you can do is allow build order automation (partial as in SCFA or entire), but since it's a largely dead genre nobody's going to expand on SCFA's template system.
I've never heard of SCFA before, but it sounds awesome. My quip about ''why play when a script can do it'' wasn't pure rhetoric, I wouldn't actually mind using scripts or templates, that sounds great.
In that case I'll elaborate some what. SCFA is Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance, sequel to Supreme Commander, itself a spiritual successor to Total Annihilation. SCFA is basically the final game in the "series" and, in my opinion, the best. It has some issues, most notably command dropping later in the games and pathfinding issues, both of which are probably due to the number of units involved and the overall scale of the game. However, it does a lot of things really well, which other RTS haven't really ventured into:
You can save buildings as templates. A basic example is a T1 turret surrounded by wall sections, which costs barely more but is much more durable. Another example is four T1 mass storage spaced so that when the template is built around a mass extractor, they will all contribute the full adjacency bonus to its production. A more fancy example is a T3 power generator surrounded by T2 mass fabricators for lategame mass production (the energy costs are offset by the pgen they surround) and with basic wall sections at each corner so you can click and drag a line of copies of the template across the map, and they'll be spaced out (due to the wall sections you built as spacers) such that their death explosion doesn't set off a chain reaction, if one is destroyed. You could also do this with your opening factory setup, either as one whole series of buildings or as a few separate templates for main base components ie a power farm, an array of factories, etc.
You can click and drag to build. One of the main reasons I and a lot of players don't bother templating our starting build orders (just finnicky stuff like mass storages or a hydrocarbon plant with energy storages around it, stuff like that, to save a ton of clicking while staying flexible) is that SupCom makes it really easy to build stuff. You can select a factory to build and instead of having to shift-click a bunch of them as you do in many RTS, you just click and drag and your worker(s) will build them in a row as you defined it. Same goes for things like pgens. I just pick a workers, hotkey for pgen, click and drag, and that's my starter power farm dealt with almost instantly. I'll probably send more workers to assist (right click on a worker that's carrying out the order and the ones you have selected will assist it with everything it does until they are told otherwise), but that's about it. I don't think most other RTS allow this, though I could be remembering wrong as SCFA is the only one I play anymore. I'm pretty sure most of them rely on Shift Clicking for every single building which is really, really tedious.
All orders can be adjusted. If you've told a worker to build a bunch of stuff, you can hold shift to see the queued orders on the map and move any unbuilt buildings to other locations, or remove them from the queue. I don't believe you can insert new orders, which is one of SCFA's limitations. You can also adjust patrol paths in the same way, or adjust rally paths from factories. Speaking of which, factories can assist other factories. If you've told one factory to build a looping queue of 5 tanks 1 arty 1 aa indefinitely and to send them on a rally path down to the front line, you can select any other factory, right click on that one, and it will produce the same queue of units and send them along the same rally path.
It has a flux economy (Homeworld does this as well to a limited degree) which means that instead of a flat price at the start, you pay for a unit as you build it. The faster you build, the faster resources are consumed. You can allocate building power via engineers assisting buildings to construct priority units or buildings faster at the expense of greater resource consumption. A common example is having a ton of engineers assist a T3 air factory to churn out air superiority fighters quickly. This isn't really a convenience example but it is an example of how SCFA pushed for better mechanics. Another example, SCFA has a full strategic camera. You can zoom out to see the entire map (units change to icons at a certain range though you can opt to always overlay the icons at any range) and zoom back in just as smoothly, at any time. It is a nice way of monitoring the overall flow of the map, provided you have sufficient radar and/or sonar coverage.
There are issues and areas where it could use improvement, like being able to let other units take over a build template instead of just assisting the ones that initially got the order, or including default production queues for factories in a template, but even with what they do have, SCFA goes a really long way in reducing a lot of the finnicky busywork that many RTS suffer from, without sacrificing complexity or hamstringing basebuilding; in fact it's more complex than most with things like adjacency bonuses and the need to maintain a sufficient power grid to run all your shields and radar, not just paying flat costs for stuff. Yet despite all that it's so much more convenient to play. This is probably why I don't mind build orders, there's a ton less clicking and setup time required in SCFA to do them compared to the experience in most RTS where you have to do a single click for each and every thing that gets built.
And I'll admit that yes, I forgot how tedious it is in most RTS until you pointed this out. And you are quite right about the build order experience in those games being unpleasant.