I would favor this idea as Civ does for the most part, but I still hate most end game maps that have crazy roads  that go everywhere, the continent with roads in every grid square.

I'm of the opinion that road building needs to be more universally available. It should be available to any faction that builds a scout with the trait. It's just too important to not have and because of the way auto roads build, the game can be a bit frustrating at times without road building.

and that's the problem. If you don't want to limit yourself to 2% of the games potential, you're in with the other 98%: Screwed.

You misunderstand. I'm not saying that the road building trait is any better. It's absurd that if you're Mancer, you can spam roads everywhere your units walk, and it's even more absurd that if you're NOT Mancer, you're absolutely screwed because getting road building takes the longest time ever. I mean, you have to level up a Commander hero, but not even that, a Commander hero in the admin tree. Basically, you have to babysit him, and babysit him, and babysit him, and by then you don't even care that you can build roads. It's stupid.

I like the idea of being able to queue roads in the city building screen, I think suggested on that other thread by GFireflyE. In his method, you have road segments, defined as between a city and a city or a city and an outpost, and you can queue these preset routes, with the production cost scaling with the length of the road. It's a neat solution which prevents spamming.