It's tedious to garden, not least because of the numerous round trips required and the problems with lag causing the plot interactions to get into an inconsistent state.
I assume that stoot is being sarcastic with his comment, but perhaps not. IMO, it does seem like a single gesture to cycle an entire plot is a bit much, but this could be balanced by having the mass action be more costly in some way.
Another possibility would be a gardening machine that performed these operations for you, but required fuel cells and you would miss out on iMG for the automated individual actions.