Quote Originally Posted by nodoze View Post
I think the difference is, at least in part, convenience vs combat.
Totally this. Combat in Wow is really the big on/off switch for automisation.

They didn't want to break auto-buffing addons, because was a serious quality-of-life thing especially for paladins back in vanilla days. But they did want to break healbot and similar addons which chose target and most efficient spell rank for you.

Incidentally, for the first few months of Classic Button:SetEnabled was unprotected during combat, so you could automate things by enabling/disabling a button that contained a macro.