Spot-on. In our game the NPC AI is ... exactly what I wanted it to be, smart and extremely "opportunistic". And the gameplay is generally such that your goal is to build structures/layout the buildings in a way that the AI will make the AI most likely to reach their goals.

To me, that's a huge part of our game -- catering to the NPCs, specifically figuring out "why are they missing X? Oh, because they're walking Z distance to the nearest bathroom!". I think the AI is fantastic but, when functioning perfectly as [we would have] expected, we still get complaints about why the 'dumb AI' will do X or Y. Part of that is defintiely a UI/UX issue on our part -- but another part is that players generally aren't used to it and they expect much more "robotic" or obvious/easy behaviors from agents/NPCs.

Emergent & opportunistic behaviors are awesome (IMO at least), but a lesson we learned is that they may not always provide players with the desired or expected gameplay experience. It'll of course always be game-specific, but it's something we will keep in mind & likely simplify further in our next game.