Stock followers/companions come with their own basic menu to get them to follow you, wait, inventory, etc. How are these tied in to the follower? Is there a small quest that they come with that contains these dialogs?

The reason I'm asking is because I need to change/add to it for the companion I'm working on, which will have a much more extensive menu and obviously their own quest line. I'm just trying to save myself some time from having to track all this stuff down. Any help is appreciated.

Those are dialogue options in the DialogueFollower quest.

There is a bug in the latest CK that means editing vanilla dialogue does not work, unfortunately.

Okay, so I simply leave that alone, add my own quest with my own dialog entries marked as hello and they should appear as well, as long as my quest has been triggered. I'd assume that would work...

Yes, make your own quest - but Hellos are just what people say when you come near (arrow to the knee and all that). For player interaction you need dialogue - see the Dialogue Views tab in the DialogueFollower quest.;

Yep, been there done that. I just need to refresh my memory on how it all works.