No, in VB Aurora there was an NPR-only 'autofire' button that was accidentally left visible to players which caused endless amounts of grief, complaints, and bug reports.
In C# Aurora there's a few quick clicks to open fire on a target. I, for one, would certainly not be in favour of a setting I could accidentally leave on that would make my ships blow away anyone that came near.
Just never turn it on if you don't need it in the first place.
I never had any issues with it.
I wouldn't say 'no issues', but if you went out of your way to design compatible ships and the stars aligned just right then it worked like a charm.
Autofire would definitely be nice in terms of acquiring new targets when the currently assigned one cant be fired at no more.
However I would not want it to automatically set all my FCs to fire. I may want to conserve missiles and the like for example. Just have it affect already activated FCs.
It was a per-ship setting and was fussy about both the ship design and how weapons were assigned to fire controls. IIRC, one of those limits was only allowing two fire controls per ship. The key to using it effectively was to only use it with ships that were designed for it.