The whole point of playing a game like civ5 for a challenge is to gain an advantage over the AI 'just for being a human'. Telling people to stop the micro and stop irritating themselves... you may as well tell people to play settler. We'll have people mirroring each others' games in the S&T forum, and those wondering how some of the guys finish the game so quickly will be told "sorry, but basically you need to learn to micro the scientists".
There's also multiplayer to consider as well, which I suspect would be typically played at quick speed. Assuming we get pitboss or pbem mode eventually, micro'ing scientists is going to be pretty much essential to stay competitive.
I understand there are a heap of people who don't play this game for a real challenge and approach it as more of a sandbox (like simcity or a simulation in general). But to ignore all the players who do it for a challenge is a big mistake. Those who play the sandbox game aren't really impacted one way or the other by presence or absence beaker overflow, so I can understand your not wanting to prioritise it as an issue that needs to be addressed. But for the challenge players, this sort of micro is so effective that asking them to ignore it would be like asking them to not use ranged units because that too is a pretty big advantage over the AI. It might be difficult to remove the human's ranged unit advantage because doing so requires either removing ranged units altogther (obviously infeasible - too drastic) or significantly improving the combat AI. Science micro on the other hand, to remove the human advantage requires only some code that carries beakers to the next tech. Pretty much the most trivial of changes (in terms of effort) that can make it into a patch, though as has been said numerous times some adjustment may need to be made to tech costs.
