Yes, the AI does use the ETS. Simple experiment: Make a mission with you and an AI ship. put in a waypoint path for the AI to follow. In-game, try to follow the AI. You will notice that it will have put all energy to engines.
With the proper AI tables, the AI will get a scarily efficient shield management as well.
If you're not seeing these things when playing with retail or mediavps data, that's a good thing, because one rule of the FS2_Open engine is that FS2 retail should still play the same, regardless of the engine version used.
It would be a good idea if you'd start to take a look around the
FSWiki's Modding section. There you can see (albeit in a very technical format) just what the engine can do.
As for your HUD not updating, well, that may be a bug. But as there's a completely new HUD system in the works, fixing it is not much of a priority.