New unit pathing is not just a QoL feature

TL;DR I see mostly positive reactions to new pathfinding, but I don't think all the gameplay indications have been considered.

Little background (can be skipped if not interested)

I am not a high rated player in any rts, but I have watched pro games of SC:BW SC2 Warcraft3 and more recently aoe2. When Sc2 came out I was super excited about it and jumped into playing/watching games immediately. Later this enthusiasm faded, and nowadays I rather watch BW pro games again (the korean scene still pretty strong). As for aoe2 I just recently started watching professional games, and find it quite a bit different but fun. Personally I really love the little things players can do to come back, or pull ahead in a game.

My argument

I know not much is known about the new pathing, but I wanted yo share my experience (or remind you) about a transition that already happened from BW to SC2.

First of all, someone much better at rts, talking about BW pathfinding, I can highly recommend: https://youtu.be/rWvoMrYCQBU

The point I want to make is, the "annoying" quirks of the game (wether BW or aoe2) are very important for balance and gameplay. The best aoe example I could come up with is knights vs xbows. Where simply microing the xbows to move back-shoot-move back-shoot etc makes them trade much more efficiently then just standing ground, because the knights will have a difficult time getting good surface area, constantly just trying to catch up and bumping into eachother. On the other hand, the knights player can spread them out manually, making his units more efficient. This creates this little micro battle which in early castle can have a huge impact on the outcome of the game.

The most important thing is, just having the counter unit is not an auto-win, because when your units are extra dumb, the significance of micro is magnified.

another non aoe example is a BW pro game recently, where both players had the same units, but one of them had 2 more. However those 2 got stuck because of pathfinding (requiring manual intervention), causing him to lose the following battle, which made the outcome of the match much more than a simple numbers game.

While it might sound unfair to the player who got the advantage to lose due to basically a bug, it makes the games much more entertaining, especially on the highest levels, because a small advantage will not necessarily result in a snowballing lead.

Conclusions

I am not saying better unit pathing/AI would remove micro from the game. It would be nonsensical to say for example that there is no impactful micro in SC2.

However if the improvement is significant, it might have massive implications in gameplay and balance. Taking my previous example, if knights would have much better pathing, it might make xbows not viable to rush anymore.