There's only one parasite, you only have to detach one thing and set the standing order for the parasite and the mothership. It's not a great deal of work. It's more tedious when you have a full compliment of parasites you have to set the orders for, but like I say it's a single grav survey vessel with a single geo survey parasite.
I agree.... it not that hard work... I used to do this allot in VB6 as well.
Sure... now we have even better tools for automating grav and geo survey efforts, but from a RP standpoint it is more fun to work with parasites.
At least now you can detach the parasite order them to automatically geo survey and then give a conditional order to return to their assigned mother ship as well. Perhaps if they are out of fuel or if there is a hostile contact or whatever...
Some micromanagement is not so bad.. that is what this game is all about.
With that said I would no mind if there were some automatic order to release a geo survey parasite and give it a preset template of standard and conditional orders. This would actually be quite valuable for many things to have templates of that sort and be able to launch parasite and automatically apply a template.