They learn how to react. Some were more guarding you, or more aggressive, or will pick up and mine stuff, etc. You can pay to retrain them if you don't like their behavior.

Sometimes, but casting has a lot of run up in DD, and sometimes the pawn might know to cast the right thing, but not have the forethought to cast it at the right time, or they'd give you a buff that was good in a current fight, then weak against the next monster, but because you can't dismiss a buff you have, you'd just be stuck weak like that.

Little things like that compounded and because I could always just do all of it myself better, instead of incentivizing me to spend a lot of time retraining a pawn without very much feedback on where their tendencies were, it was far easier and immediately gratifying in so many ways to just become mage and do it myself.

I'm hoping DD 2 will have much more transparency in the pawn behaviors and personalities, and allow even more customization of what abilities they use and when, but I do still want it to retain some of that organic learning feel, I'm definitely not advocating for a Final Fantasy 12 programmed AI routine, as much as that's cool in its own right, the organic feeling that your pawn is learning is part of the charm of DDDA.