Tradestation/MC is for system development and backtesting, not the best for real-time trading. Think open source code with broker API for real-time execution.
I'm sure you are right in many cases. But I think there are successful hedge funds that do use Tradestation to autotrade, especially if their systems do not require super high frequency trading and especially in the start up phase when staffing is low and expensive programmers are a luxury.
For example, I am aware of an extremely busy medical doctor who learned to autotrade at night after work. His fund grew to over 10 million dollars with just one person on staff, himself. Eventually he left his practice. I seriously doubt he had time to teach himself C++ and Python after working in the ER for 12 hours. Most likely he used Excel or Tradestation. Now that his fund is over a billion dollars I'm sure he has programmers on staff and/or lots of time to fiddle in C.
I want to backtest my algo but I need a few years of tick-level data that has been scrubbed for "bad ticks". Looking for Emini gold, oil, NQ, ES, and Dow futures. Must always be front-month contract data. Who sells this data ? I am sure the CME Group does....for a fortune.
Tickdata.com is a respected vendor, and reasonably priced. They provide all months, not just front. You select what you want. However 'scrubbed of bad ticks' is a double edged sword. In real trading, your algo will be facing unscrubbed data, so you might want to model that.