As far as the pointing the wrong way thing goes, the pathfinding (which is separate from the AI) can't handle ships larger than ISDs very well. Human players can correct for this a little be saying to go to a slightly different area or stop, but the AI just says "I want you here" and doesn't account for pathfinding not being optimal.
I assumed it was the game pathfinding because I've seen it things like this before to lesser degrees. Overall it was just a really funny moment and probably is the turning point in my campaign because until now I've been on the defensive fighting executor spam against my credit territories