Not conflating, this is just an extension of the earlier conversation of it not being the customers job, which we seem to agree on. Customers can, and do, articulate the undesirable behaviors that constitute “bad pathing” in as much detail as they want (as is done in the Bug Report forum, for example), but then the ball is entirely in the devs’ court to find the root causes and provide solutions. Hell, the devs are in a far better position to be aware of the undesirable behaviors in the first place, but unfortunately they outsource almost all bugfinding to the players themselves. Whether any particular forumer at any given point in time has a comprehensive understanding of all pathing issues is less relevant than the fact that the devs, whose job it is to track these issues, have been given more than enough cumulative feedback and reports to have a pretty solid understanding of what players perceive to be the problems.
I’m glad the video helped make the pathing issues more clear to more people. It’s certainly very insightful and fairly comprehensive and goes above and beyond the level of feedback provided by the average player, and shines a brighter spotlight on the formation issue than I’ve ever seen elsewhere. That said, everything in it has been noted in the past, or at least pointed to, while not described so clearly. Regrouping being such a major focus now is understandable as it has reached new lows since the last patch, as noted by others. But the core issue has been pointed out before, as well as suggestions to include a free-form “formation” choice that prioritizes movement over formation.
Even if the superior explanation and exhaustive examples of the video were particularly revelatory, and therefore tempt you to make comparisons with innovation and new technologies, I can’t understate the significance of those good examples coming from past a version of AoE2, as I’ve said. Which is why the devs don’t have to reinvent the wheel or otherwise take some revolutionary new approach in order to address the pathing issues that players have noted. They just have to assimilate the past behaviors that were superior while maintaining the DE-era improvements.