Honestly don't get the fascination with AI for Starcraft. Most of the skill when humans plays comes down to who has better micro and macro mechanics. It's not really a "thinking" game like chess or poker.
StarCraft or any RTS presents new challenges that were not covered by previous games. Basic things such as the massive action space meant that the previous “tabula rasa” approach was abandoned in favor of imitation learning to get the agents off the ground. Micro and macro are meaningless if you cannot put a build or semi-cohesive game plan together; a skill we take for granted among human players. That’s where I think the real interesting parts come about: crafting build orders, reactions to other builds, and new tactics that may emerge. You can tell that this is what the researchers are trying to achieve by limiting the throughput in terms of actions per minute.
Watch some of the games and it might change your opinion. The thesis that "AI in Starcraft will only win via improved mechanics" is false - the AI was making some fascinating decisions / fundamentally different meta strategies.
Or watch [this game](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUfwb4nOL84) between the top StarCraft AI (outside of AlphaStar) versus Serral, one of the top humans players. Unlike AlphaStar, this AI is not APM-limited; IIRC the top bots tend to play with about 100,000 APM, compared to 400 for the top humans. Serral won easily, despite the AI's vastly better mechanical skill.
Figuring out good timings, gathering intel, harrassing, doing big drops, when to invest in attacking with a gimmicky unit, etc. are all pretty big strategic decisions. A lot of people don't notice these decisions being made when they watch pro players play since they are the composition of many actions that, yes, at the end of the day are building units and moving them around. But that's like saying chess is all just moving pieces around too
I can see how micro might not be interesting for people more into strategy games like chess but the macro is strategy. Sure Starcraft may not be best for that (I much prefer Ashes of the Singularity for example for a more strategy focused RTS).
If it were just a matter of hand speed, bots using uncapped speed (tens of thousands of actions per minute) would be beating humans years ago. But quality matters way more than quantity. It's a hard problem.
This is a self-fulfilling prophecy---if you believe there's no strategy beyond moar marines and MKP splits, then you'll never find it.
I got to masters on the 1v1 ladder... there's basically a handful of build orders and tech transitions that everyone does and most of the skill difference is mechanical execution.
I believe you, but "got to masters" doesn't mean anything. Humans suck at Starcraft. Just because machines have mostly sucked even more doesn't change that.