Do I have to watch all the ships move?

Nope. They really need to have an option where the ships just slide to thier destination at about 4 or 5 times as fast as what they are now.

I think the problem is the developers are in denial about ships moving at 50+, so they don't notice or consider it a problem.

They also tend not to play anything larger than medium maps. I understand why the devs don't want to play gigantic games during testing - they take for freaking ever, and testing time is an expense - but I wish they would so they could see how unwieldy the whole game becomes at the larger sizes.

There isn't an option that I know of but there is a little trick you can use. when you aren't looking at a ship you don't have to watch it move, so to make it faster pick a point on the map and zoom in all the way so you can hardly see anything. Your computer will move all the ships in the background so you dont have to watch every one move.

I've done some software testing for different jobs and suspected that the Stardock folks couldn't afford to test much with the larger maps.

But they did improve late game, gigantic galaxy play already by fixing the problem where en route ships lost their fix after you moved a rally point, and I'm pretty sure that they did it because massive-map folks complained here.

Maybe there's a chance DA will have some movement-hiding options for us. They might not play much on larger maps, but one of the screenshots I saw for the Shipyard suggests that we'll be getting a better database-in-space interface for fleet management. (There seem to be tabs for Ships and Templates, with Templates being all we see right now in the Shipyard.)

pick a point on the map and zoom in all the way

This works quite well for me. I play on gigantic maps, but I really only have to do this when I have a lot (I mean literally hundreds) of ships moving on autopilot at the same time.

If zooming in so that moving ships are not in the display dramatically speeds up your turn, then your problem is your video card performance, not game mechanics.

The speed at which ships move accross the map is excruciatingly slow. Yes, you can zoom in on a point to put movements in the background, but most of the time, that's really quite a PITA and not worth the trouble. In this age of super fast personal computers and hardware accelerated graphics, there should be no reason why ships shouldn't just instantly appear at the position they're assigned. If it's a matter of game aesthetics, then provide an option to enable or disable ship travel.

Honestly, if I could disable this, my games would be take about 5 times less time to play. It's such an incredible waste of time to sit there waiting for ships to crawl accross the screen.

BTW, I play on gigantic maps with ships like constructors and transports pushing 100 moves per turn. On smaller maps with slower ships, this is not as much of an issue. Also, this is not a performance issue. The problem is the game uses a slow rate to move ships accross the map. That rate needs to be instantaneous or very large at least.

I've taken the opposite approach and zoom out until the world goes 2D. Not sure which is better...I definitely would like to just be able to skip seeing them move later in the game via a toggle.

Picking a point and zooming all the way... Doesn't help alot for during your turn. That's the biggest annoyance. Either allow the ship to jump as far as it can go, or do the moves at the end of the turn.