Actually, I had only one instance of AI-Ignore(-New). I only added that in because they were ignoring the protection flag. I then added in additional protection instances through the mission, in case they were being overridden at some point. I think that I even gave player commands (in mission) to ignore the target and even THAT didn't stick. Sure, they switched targets at first, but then soon after went right back to the protected target.
Anyway, I've tried something a little more complex with regards to adaptive orders, ensuring that they always have specific targets to go after. For each wing, I used a when-argument instance, so that when the last ordered targets are destroyed the wing gets orders to attack the six remaining targets, with an embedded conditional to invalidate the argument corresponding to any target already destroyed. The event has a repeat count of six and invalidates the succeeded argument, which became target for the new ai-attack order.