I vote for automating something now and optimizing as people get experience with the automation. The different strategies don't seem especially critical foe users who are happy with a five day run for karma farming.
Is there really a 10 turn difference between the choices? I'd be happy with anything, then I can hack from there if I care. Then again, I could submit a patch myself, so I can't complain. I just haven't been in a coding mood in my free time recently. Instead I replanted a huge patch of society garlic.
I added item drop (itemnc and "-i") in the library to my script for a small chance at a killing jar. That's a simple change to one line that should help everyone.
The new hidden city still has some sharp edges. There are infinite loops and it's often after an abort hard to work out how to get things restarted. I'm not sure if that's a KoL problem, but I can't seem to figure out which corners I got my stone triangles from without checking my logs. BCA should be able to restart that quest in middle, but since I find that hard to do myself, that might be a bigger problem. BCA currently can't do it.
I'm very excited about the idea of better BIG! support, but until the basic quests are handled, I'd rather wait.
Oh, and I finally figured out why no one else cared that BCA can't properly set up the non-combats in the castle correctly. BBB does. Maybe BBB should be a required script for BCA? For some silly reason, it bothers me they do the spooky forest in different orders, but I love not having to mess with the GUI to burn turns there. That time savings alone is worth my BBB problems.
Okay, sorry, that's all my bottled up gripes all at once. I've been feeling a bit bitchy recently. Hopefully there's something productive in all that.
EDIT:
And I'm sad to see a BCA fork for softcore. I don't think many changes were needed, but sadly the fork is for low skill/item softcore and I'm at the other end. Pulls/faxes/arrows/copies/etc have lots trade offs.