Well, you can only set one front one rear to auto fire, so at higher levels , it becomes useless.

I have 3 front and 2 rears on my escort, so im spamming spacebar all the time.

Precisely the OP's point. As you say, there IS an auto-fire in the game (by right clicking 1 of the fore weapons and 1 of the aft weapons), but there should be a facility to auto-fire ALL weapons when a target is within range.

You and I both know how hard work it is to keep our Escorts from being shot to hell whilst spamming the space bar / Ctrl+space / watching for the weaponry cooldowns / watching for the ability cooldowns. Hehehe.

It wasn't an answer to the question he was asking.

There is a Fire At Will ability for Tactical Bridge Officers. Other than that, you have to actually interact with the game in order to play it. Sorry. *shrug*

Have people experimented with the "auto attack" settings under the control options? There's one that says "In maintain mode you will attack for as long as the button is held down." I have no idea if that has the same problem of not applying to all weapons at once, though.

Well in WoW you actually right-click the target and your Character keeps smashing the foe with the basic weapon attack, but if you wanna add something more like an ability or class specific attack, you have to click it manually.
I know this is a different situation tough.
I believe that should no matter if you have torpedos, or just Beam, the basic attack should be firing the weapons at once and continuosly.
the "extra attacks" can be considered the shields, and the special attacks provided by your officials
Plus in space you have to handle the ship, wich is sometimes a pain the the butt.
I believe too that once targeted and selected for attack a ship has to fire even the dirty socks of the engineers continuosly and all togeder.

Semi-related:

Can we PLEASE set things so if you press AND HOLD the key/combo, it simply repeats? My Space Bar is going to break!!!

Cryptic just needs to fire the guy who thought pressing the space bar over and over again is fun and we're set.

if i have macros built in to my keyboard, is that legal? ie have "fire all weapons and torpedos" set to macro 1, then i just press macro 1 and it basically will press 12345 10 times per second. i find it painful to try and press all my fire buttons as i turn my ship for aft weapons then turn it again for forward weapons, while adjusting shields and activating my BO skills and other skills.. ive actually freaked out my computer as i was trying to press 12345 while pressing the arrow buttons (<<<<<<<< ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^) then holding control+123 and alt +123 it made my computer beep lol.. i guess it doesnt understand holding 8 buttons down at a time

That's easy - repetitive actions = carpel tunnel. All this will take is Cryptic's legal department to weigh in on the possibility of one 14 year old with carpel tunnel caused by STO and his lawsuit happy parents showing up at their door...