And about the Wedge thing. I donno. If I was in his position I would leave as ordered too. But Wedge says "I'm hit, I can't stay with you." and then Luke says "Get clear Wedge, you can't do any more good back there." It seems like Wedge was trying to bail even before Luke gave him the order to leave.
He's not trying to bail. Luke had ordered his element to go in full throttle ... "That oughta keep those fighters off our backs." After sustaining a hit, Wedge was unable to maintain that speed; he couldn't stay with Luke. (Evidently, the jamming fields around the Death Star made space a resistive medium.) Luke figured -- rightly or wrongly -- that Wedge couldn't do anything useful with a broken fighter and told him to clear the trench. We're not really sure what Wedge did after that -- the TIEs were at least matching Luke's X-wing for speed, so he was unable to pursue and shoot at them. Returning to the main group to dogfight would be a dubious proposition. Dropping his ordnance on the Death Star surface would've been satisfying, but not terribly useful. A direct assault on the superlaser could be even more satisfying, but less useful. Basically, imagine what an untrenched Wedge would be doing, and that's what he did. Or go to the C-canon. Stackpole probably wrote something about Wedge noticing the emergency exhaust port was closed and opening it for Luke after landing on the Death Star and a tense firefight with several battalions of stormtroopers. (Just kidding, I like Stackpole -- even his DS2 retcon.)
Incidentally, Keyan Farlander was the Y-Wing pilot.