Why can’t we manually turn ON email automation individually for select few clients ONLY?

Our firm has 600+ clients recently input on BM and we are successfully using task function.

We now would like to begin to use email automation on a test basis. We have been advised by BM that we would have to turn ON email automation globally (so it is turned ON for all 600+ clients) and then would manually have to turn OFF the ones that are not yet ready or set up for email automation.

It would be too time consuming to manually turn off email automation for this many clients.

Can email automation be changed so that email automation defaults to OFF when global email automation is turned ON and then turned ON individually when we are sure that we want email automation for specific clients?

For example, we would like to turn on email automation for 10 VAT clients? Can we turn these ON without having to manually turn OFF remaining 490 clients (go into each client and turn OFF)?

Can we pause emails for specific clients rather than pausing for all?

Have others firms had this issue?