So I went ahead with the ethereal pet (250k gold) and the mammoth mount (16k gold), set the whole system, using interact with target spam in place of a follow button to do this. It's pretty wonky, doesn't work nearly well as /follow, and there are issues with the ethereal guy not being available when your main dies. Overall it felt hackish. I got lifegripped away by griefing priests, had no way to follow another toon and group back up, and there's no way to automate the process of setting up a new pet to IWT with, has to be done manually.

Anyway - to the bad news. Within a few hours of doing this in battlegrounds I was slapped with a 72 hour suspension (they skipped the 3 hour one) for exploitation of game mechanics (different message than the 5.1 honor system ban, and the mistaken use of hack tools they hit me with long ago).

Called Blizzard, put in a ticket. No reversal of the ban, and the GM offered no sympathy at all, touching on that same old multiboxing is a sensitive issue, exploitation of game mechanics is not allowed, and that they were not reversing the suspension.

According to their documentation this goes 72 hours, then a week, then a permanent ban.

So much for that.