Again, I feel like you're stretching to make an analogy that doesn't actually reflect reality. You can't admit that people enjoy boring effectiveness as the premise of half the worlds' games, while also insisting that it's mutually exclusive to having fun in the other half.

I'll give you an example. Inarguably one of the most successful games of all time, World of Warcraft has multiple different paths and styles of leveling, gold farming, and most other tasks. The least effective paths are absolutely the most boring and involve hundreds of hours of grinding for very little gain, and yet, that's the consciously chosen path for a majority of players. Not because they can't figure out more proficient methods, but because they enjoy the grind (for any numbers of reasons).

The lesson learned from game designs like WoW, is that the implemented paths shouldn't be either-or propositions, because singular or linear paths alienate far more gamers than optional paths. Whereas what you're insisting, is that that the developer has done something "wrong" simply by presenting multiple paths, and they need to "improve" upon it by removing the ones which don't produce some arbitrary amount of dopamine and adrenaline per button press.