I really don't think so. Games that predate this one have, for decades, employed a 'powerup' mechanism that essentially does the same thing. It finds the best equipment based on your class and applies it to your character. Games have, for years, been able to have popups that highlight your current equipment, a new piece of equipment, and highlight the differences or put some sort of symbol to denote one item is a higher grade than what you currently have equipped. Even some silly mobile games just automagically put the best stuff on your character.

As far as the business side of it, we can agree to disagree there. Presets are something I'd pay a few bucks for. As it stands, I might hit a couple more VIP levels just because I happen to want to buy gems, but certainly not for any of the useless nonsense they give as a "benefit" at some of the higher levels (If you spend hundreds of bucks on gems, you're SO special, we'll give you the chance to spend stupid amounts of gems for little to no reward! Yay, sign me up!). Sure, would I like a perk like this to be free? Yup. I'd like my mortgage to be free too. The new servers apparently attract enough people for them to turn their buck. The problem has been servers ghosting out (as far as I can see from the posts here) and I've seen nothing whatsoever from the devs saying they feel there is a problem. So, making this something people pay for could potentially be a win-win. It might be a mechanic that encourages folks to stick around on the established servers and still gives Tynon their dollar.

It was hard to type out what my UI vision was for this because I am more used to actually presenting UIs to clients graphically so I spent some time trying to phrase it here. However, the dropdown idea is really no different than Filling out, say, a billing information form or changing your account stuffs in Amazon or whatever. Or maybe shopping at an online auto parts store when you put the make of the vehicle, then it prunes the models to an appropriate list, then prunes again to show relevant parts. Multiple billing addresses, cards, shipping addresses and whatever. While I do have little enough faith in the common sense of humanity overall, I think that most people who play these games would not totally balk at a form like this just because they've probably seen it elsewhere on the internet. Can it be made prettier than the dropdown used to embed jewels? I assuredly think so.

I know what people have been suggesting is just what you stated at the end of your post and the biggest "complication" has been 'specific rune-specific hero'. This was a way to get around that. I could add in an 'advanced' mechanism that would let the folks for whom 'best available' doesn't do enough and that mechanic would potentially be available. I think both approaches have value and merit consideration. I think either way, the player will have to think through what they have and how they want it to look and the best players will spend considerable time tweaking it. I also think there needs to be something added to show conflicts, like the little alerts like you get as a Guild host when someone puts in an application, to show that something you have in a preset is no longer available (like when you merged runes) or whatever.

Is it complicated? Sure. The reason constantly having to change all this stuff is so obnoxious is because it IS complicated to get everything just right for each scenario. Think about all the steps of logic you go through to change from one formation to another. Asking a computer to do it for you doesn't change the level of complexity of the task, as I know you are well aware.

The other approach would be as simple as taking a 'snapshot' which it already has to do or else you wouldn't be in the same formation with the same heroes, runes and equipment as when you logged out. The problem with the snapshot is that you'd have to make sure you had a firm grasp on how you wanted to deal with the dynamic aspects of things that change.

But, whatever. I'm fond of coming up with solutions moreso than gripes so I thought I'd think it though and present something.