Yeah, thought probably so but was hoping maybe.
No, most don't use PTZs with tracking. They're very nice to have (obviously) but, at least as far as the tracking goes, they seem to kind of do what they do to some extent. Different scenes will determine that along with cam and BI settings. You have a good cam and look to have a fairly ideal view for it to work well so I'd expect that you can get yours working better.
Mine is a mess with things in the way all over so when it breaks off and stops tracking there's usually good reason for it. But it does just do odd things for no apparent reason at times and there's no real control over that as far as I can see. I run mine continuous+trigger so it never stops recording. Whether it's pointed to record and how well it tracks whatever of interest at a given time is a different matter. I don't use it as a 'primary' cam. Obviously, I want it to work as well as possible but whatever it captures with the auto-tracking and whether I get an alert/clip from it of any value is kind of in addition to. So I don't worry all that much about it losing tracking and missing something.
You have a different use case there. You're trying to use the 180 to make it work more as your primary cam for multiple areas. I think you probably can get there (for the most part at least) but will take more playing with it to make it work reliably. I agree it shouldn't be that hard. But you've got a lot going on between BI/ONVIF/IVS/tracking,etc. Which was why I was saying to try to simplify things and get one thing working well and then deal with whatever quirks as you add complexity.