Chocobo Companion does not attack any Target if you only AoE

From my searches, it appears the Chocobo companion used to be much worse, so firstly I'd like to thank SE for bringing it to where it is today -- a decent combat companion.

Of course if it was just a wee bit smarter... ;D

I've decided to start leveling up BLU some time after the rage following updates, and as you can imagine I'm spending a lot of solo time in the open world with my trusty Chocobo companion :cool: In its early stages, the class is actually more vulnerable than I thought, and so I'm really trusting my bird, or so I thought. I'd begun to like and use a few of the AoE spells (e.g. 1k Needles, Mind Blast), when I began to notice something...

if you use only AoE spells, your bird does not attack. At all. It may give you regen if in free or healer mode, but it will not attack any target.

A follow up to this is

if the target your bird was attacking dies, and you only AoE remaining mobs that already are aggro'd on you, your bird does not attack.

^As if the bird completely forgot we were in a fight, side by side, together.

Why not just use Flying Sardine, you might ask? While instant, it's a spell on the global cooldown, and all spells you might actually want to be using (namely AoEs like Mind Blast) are now put on a lovely ~2.5sec cooldown. Great.

Interestingly, an ability that actually gets your chocobo to wake the f up is Addle, instant, 90sec CD, lower's target's intelligence and mind by 10%. Similarly, Off-guard kinda works, increasing the vuln on a target by 5%, but it takes ~1sec to cast.

And yes, I'd even put my chocobo in Attacker Stance to rule out a stance issue. The chocobo should be smart enough to attack on its own -- I shouldn't have to cast a single-target spell/ability every time I need it to get its head back in the game.

It did and does this for all attacks that are initiated as a non-target-AOE by any Job that has such abilities.
If you are going to go all out non-target-AOE, then simply auto-attack one of the mobs while AOE'ing, and your Chocobo will attack it.
Switch auto-attack to the next mob that smacks you after it dies, so your Chocobo switches to it.
Auto-Attack doesn't trigger or use any CD/GCD used for spells or abilities and weaves itself into the other abilities.

The main reason that Chocobos can't attack on their own is to prevent exploits, such as Chocobo pulling or parking a character in the middle of a gang-KOS-spawn and just let the Chocobo go to town shredding while AFK.