Sorry guys, I know you're looking forward to my addon, and I'd love to get it out, but I'm still waiting on the Windower team to merge dev to live to get the changes in. To answer a few questions:
Essentially, the addon recreates the menu event VM packet flow that a player generates when going through the free runs menu series. This lets you avoid the client delays when selecting options and pretty much just march through all the packet series in order. The game already gives you the option to skip the race cutscene, and that is used.
It takes roughly about 5-10 seconds to complete one "run" this way, depending on if you use things like PacketFlow and whether or not you want to use an item (which needs to be selected before each run, adding two more menu options). The addon currently runs them in sets of 8, so about a minute or so on average for me.
For those unaware of how free run cycles work, there's basically a repeating cycle of 8 sets of birds that show up on your run. There's three "super birds", one from each nation, who actually have capped stats and Gallop + Canter, and are generally the only challenge for a properly statted racing bird.
For five races, you will have one of these super birds, and six NPCs of varying weakness levels as your opponents. For the next two, you'll have six weak birds with no super birds at all. And for the last one, you'll get all three super birds in the same race. Everyone seems to start at a different "offset" into this cycle, so your first free run ever might be one of the weak races, or the one with all three super birds, etc. You can really only figure out where you are in the cycle by checking your opponents manually before a race.
Without using speed apples, you generally will beat a super bird about 50% of the time. So that means for five races you'll either be 1st or 2nd, two races you'll always be first, and the last you can be somewhere between 1st and 4th. Using a speed apple, the odds of beating them is upped to maybe 75-80% or so? But it's up to you to measure the gil cost vs the chocobucks earned.
My addon allows you to specify if you want to use speed apples on specific races in the series, so you can decide if you want to never use them, use them only on the hard race, on all races with super birds, etc. But you'll have to determine which races are which, or run single runs to align it however you want.
I don't really do free runs any more, but when I did, I usually only used apples on the hard race, and I'd get between 26 and 40 chocobucks per set of 8. I'd usually do 2-3 sets per day, depending how desperately I needed trains. Once you pass 3 sets you're spending more than the AH cost for trains tend to be (assuming they're around 100k).
Example time from me:
