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Depending how long ago you last played, the early game may have already changed. It's never been possible to go straight for the facility on the first loop, so you must have not had enough supplies. That being said, early versions were much harsher on how well you had to play in order to survive. At this point, it's relatively difficult to die on loop 1 unless you make a lot of bad decisions. Also, if you do die on the first loop, there is nothing more to it. Without the first artifact, you are just dead and have to load/start again. I guess I could tell players that "if you got a bit further, you'd have unlocked this new feature", but that feels unecessary and spoilery.

The topic of automation has come up many times, and has been discussed in many directions. Most of my thoughts on the matter are on the Trello Roadmap. Short version is that if I do add automation, it'll likely be along the lines of what you described. But the people who want automation are in the minority, so it's not a high priority feature for now.

Fast forwarding the queue also occasionally gets requested, and that's just not going to happen. At least, not in the form of a "go faster button". It'd mess with the pacing of the game, frequency of messages etc. That being said, I am constantly working on ways of reducing the frustration of that aspect of the game with features like Combined Actions and Time Dilation which make it run faster without upsetting the balance or pacing of the game. In the next major update, I plan to introduce a new form of time dilation which is applied to all long actions (including long combined actions), effectively giving you auto speedup on the long journies and heavily repeated sections like Talos.