That's understandable, the niche issue thing. (We tend to be niche-focused and doing/checking out weird things.) No worries, I can get by! It's mostly-solved as far as I'm concerned anyways since I found my workarounds. Plus, yes, your idea of making the window not take mouse input would 100% solve this specific issue I'm having, if I can't click it to active, Xsplit can't glitch out on it~
Actually I didn't skip the capture tutorial, I read it a couple times. I just suck at information-retention sometimes. ^_^; Sometimes I need stuff worded to me in a different way for me to fully understand it. It's a learning disability (it made me fail math as a kid, I never got my high-school diploma mostly because I could not understand many abstract concepts in it), and it made me misunderstand something in that tutorial for sure. The 'naming' is probably part of it, but I agree, I can't think of a better name either.
I see, it's not meant for fullscreen. Yeah - that's fine with some games with their text boxes in one place, but some games have their text all over the place, like the one I was testing ironically. (That game is one of those where the text box will be placed high or low based on the player and npc positions on the screen, among other visual tricks.) I guess it's possible to update the screen capture area manually either way, but this is also why I found the Manual mode just made more sense. Again, for games like that, at least. (Manual mode obviously has the huge downside of 'I must stop focusing on game controls to do this', which could be bad with more actiony stuff. I understand the value of Automatic mode for sure.)
Mixing Manual and Automatic could be functional, depending. I think my only real request would be to always let us have a standalone Manual option, just in case the basic direct approach is less buggy than Automatic functions for a person... Even if you don't wanna keep updating Manual mode (if it is a niche thing not used much, understandable), just letting it continue to exist is all I'd really ask. :)
As for making Automatic mode less destructive, could you maybe point out which options I should be exploring more? I did see a number of things that sounded potentially useful, but even with the mouseover tips I wasn't sure what I should be messing with. I did a few changes to some things I thought would help its formatting, but then was further confused because it seemed like I'd made no visual changes whatsoever even though I had changed some options.
Also no worries, feel free to take your time~