I'm sure I'm not the only one who's fed up with this. I get that auto-assisting is a nice feature, especially for people who have little to no experience leading a target. The reticle by itself is nice, helping enough. The auto-aiming 'feature' from vanilla takes not only the challenge out sometimes, but plain destroys aiming in the process.
For those people who have even the most basic understanding of how to aim and lead a target at range, the whole auto-aiming is actually quite detrimental in most aspects. Sure, it makes snubbing a little easier, but the same can't be said for everything larger than a gunboat, or even some gunboats in general.
If it can be removed, or 'altered', then it would honestly be a step towards flexibility.
The autosnap is a critical part of Freelancer's gameplay and pvp would be ruined with it removed. You have to adapt to it and be able to use or not use it as the situation demands.
Spectre is referring to the feature that will make all of your weapons focus on a single point if you have your crosshairs right over the centre of the reticule. It's generally referred to as the autosnap.
Not sure that turning auto-aim off would have the effect you wish for.
Auto-aim makes guns that are mounted at in various locations on your ship (in the case of caps, pretty far away locations) aim at a point in 3D space, not at a point on a 2D screen. Without auto-aim, the gun won't know where the ship is in the third dimension. It could be anywhere on the z-axis if you take your screen as the x and y axis.
A gun won't fire where you want it on the 2D screen unless the gun is mounted exactly in the middle of the screen, which non of them are. This is a problem for aiming multiple guns at the same target that gets worse the closer the target is to you, and the farther the guns are away from each other.