An artist's depiction of an Extended Unit Death
wonder why they cut the ALL functions out. Maybe blizzard should look into this or respond to why it was cut
If Blizzard was going to address this, it would have been done for Warcraft III's editor. The general concept is starting broad and filtering down. Unit Group's default pick action is picking all alive units in the entire map for all players, and you can filter it from there. Making the unit group is about as much effort as making the entire action in SC1, but the structure is much more powerful because you can apply that unit group to nearly any other action, whereas in SC1 you could not (i.e. Disable Doodad State only applied to one unit at a time in SC1).
This kind of question happens quite frequently.
For example, why must we use Player Groups with the "Text Message" action? Why can't we display a message to a Player directly? >_>
That's actually a legitimate question. I guess Blizzard assumed that you would be sending messages to more than one player more often. There's always the "Convert Player to Player Group" function, though, which I suppose is easier/looks cleaner than having to pick each player.
Anyway, you can make functions in SC2 to better match SC1's actions, but it requires a lot of work. You'd have to make accompanying actions in most cases, but the function would look a little like this:
allUnits
Options: Function
Return Type: Unit Group
Parameters
Location = (Entire map) <Region>
Number = (Number of Living units in returnedGroup) <Integer>
Player = 0 <Integer>
Grammar Text: Get Number units at Location owned by player Player
Hint Text: (None)
Custom Script Code
Local Variables
returnedGroup = (Empty unit group) <Unit Group>
Actions
General - Return (Any units in Location owned by player Player matching Excluded: Missile, Dead, Hidden, with at most Number)
Then you could just do "Pick all units in allUnits(Number, Location, Player)" to get a number of units in a location owned by a player, but I don't see why you would want to limit the unit group to this.
SC2 is more verbose, but it is certainly more powerful than SC1. You can specify dead units, flying units, units matching any condition, etc. Get used to the syntax and it will be more beneficial, even if you have to say kill unit by "Pick every unit in (Units in entire map owned by player 1 matching condition with at most any amount) and do Actions: - Kill picked unit."