Personally I am in the group of not wanting FFXI's battle system, as I do feel that people who want auto attack use that battle system as an example, for both a pro and a con. I believe that's because for us players who came from XI have fond memories of it, so I can understand why people are so for or against auto attack.

That bit of confusing rambling being said I'll post my hopes and thoughts and I guess we'll know more in the coming weeks of what the new battle system looks like.
  1. Being a high ranked player, I find that playing short play sessions I don't mind the battle system at all, and in fact I find it enjoyable. If I end up playing for longer then 30 minutes my view changes and I get tired, and want to do something else. Craft, etc.
  2. During fights, I am unable to effectively talk and fight. For those that can, more power to you, but trying to make sure everyone is alive, and also respond to a tell I just received can be difficult. Thus I end up telling my LS and other friends "Going to fight, talk to you after" which makes since, because in a real fight, I wouldn't be chit chatting away with someone on my cell phone, but it does make it hard to be more social in game.
  3. I'm all for auto-attack, but my hope is that it's just a very basic attack, or something that can be toggled on or off, really I don't know what they plan to do. I do think a lot of the issues come down to the fact that it's hard to tell what each player's role is in the game, but that's a topic for another discussion.
  4. Personally, I would love to see a system that had an auto attack, and also let me queue up attacks on my character that allowed me to setup which skills I wanted to use when I wanted to use them. This is hard to describe in ways, but the idea is that I can press actions and have them show up and be executed in the order that they get queued up, I can then clear my queue if needed, and perhaps other options.

Anyway, those are just some thoughts, I'm hoping to learn more next week as the devs have hinted.