It's not a red herring because many combat situations, most actually, involved you pausing the game and issuing your characters commands. Many of those characters would then act at around about the same time. The characters that did need re-assigning of actions would often occur at the same time.
This was particularly true for BG1, IWD1 and IWD2. BG2's was a little bit more chaotic but never unmanageable (and also the most fun).