Do you see this as an action RPG with AI comrades or an RTS where you micro manage your fleet.
Right now it is none of that. You need to use command, but you have to keep in mind that they are not exactly what you would want them to be.
I do not want it to be an rts, none of us want. I just want to coordinate my fleet a little bit. Maybe add separate more stricker commands.
the AI is not that dumb. It tries its best to survive and play around the player.
It is. It does not. Or more accurately it does when you equip it "properly". "Proper" meaning that exact 2-3 types (sometimes less) of loadaout the ai is competent to use in a given ship. Hence why most of the complains about ai is answered by "huhh your loadout is not optimal". The problem with this is that a ship could be awesome with very different loadouts if it we wre able to make it use different strategies. Right now it is impossible beacuse as you said command are more like guidlines, and we cant expect ships to have drastically different ai for every given loadout.
Formations as suggested here will help in one department, and then make more problems along with it.
Yes. But at least we could only blame ourselfs for those problems. If I order a ship to g and die, and it goes and dies, then it is all right, its my fault. But if I order a ship to defend a point and it starts playing merry-go-around the map chasing a frigate and then dies, then hell yeah im frustrated beacuse i wanted none of that.
The IMPORTANT stuff: It is allright that ships can do thing on their own without orders, awesome game desing. But there should be orders that are followed really strickly so people could try new and interesting tactics.
EDIT: Btw I know for a fact that most players don't stick around for many different reasons, certainly it's not because of "dumb AI".
This is not the first, and sadly probably not the last post complaining about ai, saying that this will make them leave the game. The last time when this much complaining was done was about the new skill system and that got changed pretty fast.