You can measure units sold, you can measure the player base/popularity, you can measure longevity, but you can't measure "best" and everyone's definition of it varies.
Pretty much universal critical acclaim (contemporary and retrospect), the only RTS to be included in top competitive tournaments continuously since its release, best selling PC game in its release year, 10 million copies sold overall, still the most played online RTS. I agree that the definition of best is somewhat subjective, but anyone with sense will realise that this is as close to "best" as it gets. And, there's absolutely no wiggle room whatsoever to call SC a "bad" game.
Total Annihilation's UI wasn't much of an improvement at the time, only adding the ability of shooting-and-moving.
Actually, TA's UI was pretty much revolutionary at the time. It's undeniably more powerful than Starcraft's, no contest there. However, a powerful UI is not very useful for competitive gaming because it detracts from the overwhelm factor.
Strategic ability, outside of the current way the RTS genre has developed (real life and chess for example), has almost nothing to do with how fast a person can move dumb-as-rock pieces around. It has to do with setting up patrol routes, supply lines, and deciding on paths to combat zones; not telling Private Last Class Homer to move two feet to the right.
Strategic decision making is comparatively easy in the context of games. There's only so many decisions you can make, and given unlimited time all strategies will approach optimal. That's why time has to be included in the equation - timed turns in competitive chess or the more dramatic real-time execution of RTS games, for example.
The whole point of RTS games is to include manual dexterity, quick decision making and tactical execution into the overall strategic framework. An RTS player who is capable in all these areas is
supposed to be superior to another player who is not as quick on his feet. A game that de-emphasises some of these areas is actually dumbing down the genre rather than smartening it up, since it reduces the skillsets necessary to be successful. Progress can, of course, be made in this area like all others, but a fanatical avoidance of micromanagement is not the right direction.
As for the comment that micromanagement = skill or at least is conducive for pro-style competition, I don't agree. TA had lots of unit and production automation and still required alot of skill to play.
TA is a great game (I prefer it over Starcraft myself), just not as good a competitive game as Starcraft. TA has more randomness and always had somewhat worse balance, not only unit-wise but in regards to gameplay aspects too. There's also the issue of unlimited resources. The automation, queues and resource accumulation method result in less ways to separate players no matter how you look at it. SC is also superior as a spectator sport with clearly distinctive sides and units.
You could think of Starcraft as a sleek sports car with a ridiculously powerful engine and TA as a luxury limo with a surround-sound DVD theatre and a bubble bath. When you want competition and thrills, you pick Starcraft. When you want to get from place A to place B in comfort and style, you pick TA.
Micro is less a part of the game, but that doesn't mean it requires less skill, just a different kind of skill.
Actually, that's exactly what it means. All else being equal, if you remove or simplify an aspect of a game that takes some ability to execute, you are essentially dumbing down the game by reducing the set of abilities that it takes to be successful at the game.
Heck, some make you pay over time during construction, far superior!
Depends on how you look at it. For casual play yes, probably. But if you want to separate players in a competition, Starcraft's way is clearly superior - the SC player who is fast enough to produce units continuously but one at a time will have an edge over a player who waits for resources to accumulate, then queues several units at once. All other mechanics being equal, paying over time would remove this edge from the faster player, resulting in a game less suited for competition.
