guessing you didn't spend a lot of time fighting/soloing mobs on SMN that have huge AOE, enhanced movement speed, extreme fast cast traits, etc.....various characteristics where the pets natural instinct to auto attack is very beneficial (if not virtually critical) to success? This is also useful in party setups as well, not just solo, though it is most beneficial to soloing and was an extremely important mechanic when SMN where reduced to nothing but a cure-spam battery in parties for years and pretty much had to solo if they wanted to use their avatars outside of specific strategies for burn parties or things like CoP NM fights.

So yeah....if you've seriously played SMN for more than 2 years, pet auto attack was a fairly key aspect of the job.