Same here and would like to be able to turn the feature off. 

Alternately, you can uncheck "automatically order upgrades" on the sponsor screen and the starbase system will work as before.

I put hundreds of starbases just around my home system 

In my next insane map I plan to make a starbase  highway system which will have thousands potentially tens of thousands of starbases 

I play Large galaxies and once again am asking for a global method to turn this off. I find it causes me more time and mousing than previously and the thin green lines everywhere don't enhance what was a beautiful screen.

1) One problem is that my SY's now queue up lousy formulators rather than the much better and 2 construction point constructors that I want to make.

2) When a formulator arrives the top item in the queue is automatically built as it should be. But when a double constructor arrives I don't have anything built from the queue automatically. I can double click as always and quickly build upgrades not in the new queue, but to manually build the item in queue I have to remove it first! This means excess and needless mousing. Most certainly I should be able to also double click on the upgrade in the queue to manually tell my constructor to build it.

I am certain that if I played enormous sizes I'd find this new auto-method more useful, but many users don't play in galaxies that size.

Thx .. neilkaz ..

Yes, we added that recently so you can apply that current setting for your entire empire.  

To me it makes no sense to play a small galaxy.