I can see uses for both situations. Like rearming.. I can see a time when you'd want to have a single ship rearm, but there's also a lot of use for good-rearm-time.
During sections of missions where I want all my fighters to burn to a far away target, a way to tell the AI that now's a good time to use their burners would be preferable to having to tell each ship separately.
Though, I already get around this by creating an invisible hostile craft at the target destination and tell the AI to kill it.. then just clear the orders when they get close enough.