To add to the other replies: Game development happens under constant tight deadlines and doing things perfectly is almost never done because there's no time for

To add to the other replies: Game development happens under constant tight deadlines and doing things perfectly is almost never done because there's no time for it. Furthermore, starting with a pathfinding routine that returns the optimal path and then optimizing it so far that it can run under real-time constraints (you don't want a two-second pause when sending units around) is prone to break things. And figuring out why pathfinding results in bad paths in some cases can take quite a while (had to do so in a product that calculated cycling and hiking routes on a map). So I guess as long as the result is good enough (and the most common routes will be short anyway) there's no need to invest more time and instead focus on other things that are currently unshippably broken.