Obviously depends on whether you view automation as just a bonus approach or your main trading goal, I personally feel that the opportunities that manual trading offers are far too good to turn down and getting your own hands dirty is a lot more interesting than leaving all that fun for your bots.
Not much more I wanted to add, it all looks daunting at first but you can learn how to use Bet Angel and its auto features inside of a few weeks, the amazing work of Dallas and a few others makes sure of that. Automation in general may sound daunting but it's really not if you start small and simple at first, you can probably get a ton of data advice from people if you asked nicely, but if you're attacking automation via the manual trading route then you wouldn't really need to.
By starting small I mean say you develop the ability to trade (grind) smaller markets like greyhounds or daily Aussie racing and things like that, that would mean you should then have the ability to automate some of it, because in order to trade them you would need to understand the structure of that market and how it behaves. And if you can manage to do that then you should be ready to attack the next bigger market if you wished, and so on, with each previous success giving you exactly the right tools to attack the next market (because they are all linked in some way, shape or form). Same thing for manual trading, how convenient is that?!
Because a greyhounds market is practically the same market as a horse racing one, it just never gets the opportunity or the time to fully mature. A lot of markets share the same structure and similar characteristics, and learning more about those will unlock all sorts of automation doors for you, should you wish to open some of them.
) a lot but still have a crack. There is something fun about creating something that acts autonomously. I have only found some success manually trading though. I have yet to hear about anyone who will own up to making money off BA automation long term - other than Euler - and I have asked on this forum before (oops re gauntlet 
) but of course maybe the successful ones keep shtum who knows. Most of the successful ones, I get the feeling, are writing their own bits o code. Doing this stuff is hard..doing it via bots successfully is truly in the realm of the elite ..to me anyway.
but its generally a set and forget job and have done this for the past 3 years with only minor tweaks here and there, Its not actually complicated but it relys on using common sense such as increasing stakes during good runs and reducing gradually during drawdowns, Im in the drawdown period right now otherwise i might not be browsing the forum looking for other ideas 
I know i only have an edge because of the drawdown and no one would want to stomach that but after years of attempting to manual trade and then fail its what ive resigned to.
