Yeah, basically the fleet AI is a placeholder right now. The AI in general is a placeholder right now.
It sucks because it was never intended to be good, it was intended to be "good enough" to test other things. Its not getting updated much right now because they're still adding and changing things that it can potentially do, so they want everything to be in place before it gets rewritten from scratch.
Keep working on your fleets, but you're basically going to have to mothball them for the time being.