As it stands now considering how many melee abilities are available I don't think the recast timers are to troublesome.

Looking at archer update they pretty much gave a spot on detail of how recast on the shots work so one should be able to easily make a macro for archer shots. I know in XI it was tougher since we never really got an exact number on how many seconds it was and then there was the issue that if you try RAing to fast and couldn't you would have to wait even longer but since the abilities have timers on top of them it'll be easy enough to know when you can fire again.

I can also understand why they couldn't make RA an auto-attack, if you consider an archer has to stand still when attacking it would be a lot harder to implement RA since you would most likely have a situation where you "auto-battle" auto-set RA you move, ra is intererupted, wait 2 seconds RA again, and make sure you are standing still lol. So I can see that people may feel an even less hands on experience with archer. If they did setup the recast properly with range attacks though it should be easy enough to setup a macro that "Fires a shot" -waits- "fires a shot" -waits-, etc.

The play test once it goes live will definitely be interesting, I'm curious as to how the playstyle will change now that we are more reliant on recast timers for abilities rather then stamina.