Soldiers vs Pets

I've been thinking about skirmishes and trying to figure out the nature of the beast, so that I can learn how to excel at them. I play a lore-master, primarily, which means that I am used to having a pet to do my bidding. I thought that surely my soldier would be the same kind of thing and that I had a leg up on how to deal with them. Well, I don't. Soldiers are a whole different thing, really. Here are some key differences:

Control
Your pet will obey a variety of commands, such as 'kill everything that can blink' or 'sit still no matter what'. You can't control your soldier. Your soldier is a free-'thinking' being who will do basically as she pleases. She is like your classic townsperson who has 'had it up to here' with the evils besieging her town. She's frothing at the mouth and raring to go and you don't have any ability to hold her back (other than not summoning her in the first place - a bad idea). She'll break your roots and mezzes and she won't care. She'll run up to the boss doing AoE if it suits her - you can only tell her to attack something else if you want her to stop that.

Positioning
As mentioned, you can tell your pet where to be. You can tell them to stay or follow. You can try to control your soldier's position, but you'll have to be clever about your own positioning to do this. I believe this depends on your soldier's role, but an example is the warrior, who insists on being in front of you. This translates to always being in front of you no matter which direction you are facing. She will run off ahead of you, so if you think there's something there to aggro, be prepared for her to begin the fight on her schedule (not yours).

**Handy trick: I've taken to backing toward fights, so that I am between my target and my soldier. That way, I can initiate the fight by mezzing my choice of targets (I don't have to face my target for that to work), and then the others rush toward me, and since my soldier is standing further from them than I am, and facing away from them, it buys me more time to drag them away from my mezzed target before she opens up her AoE attacks.

Relative Importance
Pets are important, but if you lose your pet, you will probably be okay. Soldiers are much more important in the land of skirmishes. You will constantly be outnumbered, and I am getting the impression that your soldier isn't just there to help you take the edge off of that. I believe the idea is that your soldier is supposed to be, in basic terms, your equal. If you're in a 3-man skirmish, then from what I've seen, it appears to be about the same environment as a full fellowship instance. A fellowship skirmish is more or less like a 12-man raid environment. I haven't tried a 12-man skirmish, but I bet it's like a 24-man raid. The key difference is that your soldiers don't communicate with you, and they don't have a whole lot of variety.

With all this in mind, I will be focusing my skirmish marks on getting my soldier up to my level, so she can be a formidable teammate rather than a throwaway helping hand.