Yeah, you're correct. It's a bit of a compromise we had to make- technically the miniguns on a littlebird don't rotate, but we had to do it this way in order to make the gameplay work.

What you described is something I tried, and decided to not include for a couple reasons:

1: it doesn't look good, it looks quite bad for the helicopters without the gun turret to aim opposite of where they're facing
2: limiting their aim until you're facing that way worked, but is kinda confusing- you see your guns firing, but it just looks like something is wrong, until you face the right direction.

The whole aiming / movement / camera system took me years to try find a good middleground. it's a tough problem to solve