Awesome.  Thanks for the kind encouragement.
That is exactly what I was hoping they would be good for.  That and as a learning aid for new players.
A new player could fly an hour in the Melee and maybe get a cumulative 4-6 minutes of trigger time.  That is a very inefficient way for them to learn basic gunnery.  They spend most of their time on auto-pilot getting somewhere, get a few squirts, and boom they are back in the tower.  Rinse, repeat. 
They can run a offline mission over and over again.  They could get more practice on a maneuvering target in an afternoon than they would get in a month of Melee flying around on auto-pilot.
AI are never going to be a replacement for fighting experience human pilots, but they can help with developing the basic muscle memory of hitting a twisting turning target under g-load.
And they run it over and over again with little time waste.  Try the different planes and get a feel of how they handle. etc.
Now all we need is a new player someday.  

  But I'm glad you are getting some use out of it too.