Having played Homeworld 2 (very similar to Sins) and beaten a couple of compstomps with friends, I've noticed that as fleets get ever more massive, incentive and advantage to micro-manage goes down slightly. Here are some reasons:

When targeting a specific capital ship or some other high priority target, one might group select all his/her units to attack that ship. But after that ship is destroyed, it is very tedious to click on each ship to attack another ship (to try to attack each ship in the enemy fleet on a 1v1 basis). Even though the side-panel helps slightly with the micromanaging (clicking of fast moving ships or a specific ship in a cluttered fleet can be hard sometimes), however it would be nice if you can do a attack group selection command with your fleet, just like in Homeworld 2.

For those who might not have played Homeworld 2, what do I mean? When you have any amount of your own ships selected, you can hold down a key (I think it was ctrl at the time), and group select an enemy fleet. This would assign (as much as possible) an enemy ship to each of your ships (on a 1v1 basis). I don't think this command would be too difficult to implement in a next patch for Sins, plus it would make fleet micromanagement so much easier.

If the developers want extra credit , it would be even sicker if using this command, the computer would also try to auto-assign as many of the 1v1 ship pairs based on what units each of your ships were good at destroying. Nevertheless I do love this game, but it would be even cooler if you could do this. If anyone else agrees/disagrees, throw in your input! If enough people request, Im sure, knowing Stardock, that this might become a reality.