I was wondering about this recently.

Is there a way to "program" the spawn point so only a playable character spawns and not their whole away team?

Like the Colisuem ground map, where your BOFFs are not present.

Doing something like this means your mission would be broken for people playing on teams (i.e. 2+ players).

I wouldn't recommend it unless you want poor reviews.

Well, it's basically a testing map, not one for live deployment.

I'm practicing my melee combos on targets and I don't want 4 security officers following me around getting in the way.

But I know it worked in Colliseum, the number of enemies scaled to the number of human players in Collisuem.

Place the spawn as high as you can: The BOFFs die upon impact, live players don't .

you could possibly add some objects like forcefields into the map, that start as hidden, but when a place marker is reached, the forcefield becomes visable. The Place marker only registers when your live character reaches it, not your away team characters. I did something similar to this in the first map of my mission "The Regula Incident", i used a hidden door/wall that became visible upon entry to the ready room and thusly locked out all my away team members

You could just click the waypoint icon and have them stay somewhere.

Yeah, i tried the waypoint method, but every time I reset the map for another round, the waypoint is deleted.

And I'm not looking to do fancy tricks, I just want the spawn point to do the hard part for me.

If what Cryptic claim is true, that the featured episodes were created with the Foundry and I can't replicate the spawn point from the Colisuem arena, I'd doubt the veracity of that claim.