I disagree heavily that the pathfinding issues are corner cases. You are guaranteed to run into them once your city reaches a large enough size. Looking at /r/simcity it seems like once you reach a level 3 city hall or so (I forget the population required for this) the bottlenecks start getting really bad and the bad agent AI makes them difficult to diagnose and repair.

If the only way you play is to build large, spread out suburbs full of low-density buildings then yeah, you can conceivably play the game without seeing the ill effects of the bad pathfinding.

But as soon as you even see your first high-density high-rise the whole thing starts to fall apart.

I don't think this is necessarily unfixable - but it does require a level of reimplementation that I don't think EA would be willing to make.