Go short-sight yourself, thorsten. Curtis and torsten already gave these reasons on the mailing list, no need to copy them. But two code bases and a GUI that is more complicated than necessary is still stupid.
They did in fact not give 'these reasons', they mentioned just one of them (ability to reliably reproduce a setting) - my list is a bit more exhaustive and detailed. (In actual fact, I also answered the forum before delving into mails, so by the time I wrote my list I wasn't aware of your list post and the answers).
Thanks for calling the the weather model crowd stupid by the way - I'm sure you could do much better than us. Why don't you design the GUI, propose it and deal with all the problem reports?
Probably you guys are right about not wanting to remove the basic weather (I wasn't aware of the mentioned limitations of AW), but what I think would satisfy a lot of AW users would simply be to have AW autostart if (and only if) it has been selected before, just like ALS.
I think I said this before, but weather has a lot of use cases and the GUI needs to cater for all of them. Which makes the current GUI not optimal for any particular use case.
Personally I never use METAR because I like preparing the 'mood' for a flight, so opening the weather dialog, spending a minute with it to tweak the settings before launching it is my usual mode of operation. If you launch automatically, you sort of restrict weather choice to METAR (or some other default assumption).
Really all you need to do to start AW automatically is to add a command
settimer( func {local_weather.set_tile();}, 5.0);
(or tweak the timer a bit) somewhere to the Nasal codebase and it will launch with the current menu settings. However, I suspect that's going to confuse as many users if actually done. I don't think there's an intuitive way to control a system which is essentially a launcher bundled with a system that's always on.
I've said this elsewhere - we've had long and hard discussions leading to the current weather GUI with pages of text exchanged on the mailing list - I won't open this can of worms again, I can live with the current GUI and believe my time and energy is best spent doing other things. If you feel the GUI needs to be changed, you have to do it yourself, make a feature request and get it discussed on the mailing list, I won't do it for you. I do suggest you read up the past exchange before hand though