Are there any benefits to disabling "Starting worker rally"?
I have seen the following checkbox in the Options menu:
Enable starting worker rally
There is an explanation in an answer to this question about where to rally workers, but I'm curious why there is an option to disable worker rallying. Are there really situations where there is a potential economic benefit - or is this just for "old school" players?
Aside from what you yourself suggest, that some players simply dislike the change, I can think of one relevant consideration: Expansions.
While "Starting Worker Rally" sets the worker rally point for your first base, expansions will not automatically rally to nearby minerals.
Friends of mine who have been playing HotS since the open beta have previously complained to me that they forget to rally their workers at their expansions precisely because their first base auto-rallies. If you find this to be the case, you may wish to turn it off, at least until you become better at consistently setting worker rally points.
One other consideration is that some players like to manually split their workers up so that the workers are spread evenly across the minerals.
At my level of play the seconds I gain as my laggy game starts up and I don't have to select workers and click on minerals far outweigh any GM-level splitting.