The idea of a playback path is that you can go through the content in any order.
The DVD engine supports the arbitrary playback of movie chapters to support two features that were not possible before:

1.     In the old versions of Pinnacle Studio, an intro that was also part of the movie was written to the disc twice. In PS16, the intro can be “reused”.

2.     Use the same content for a complete playback and return-to-menu.

Another feature is the selective playback. For example, you have a clip with 10 cells. A playback path could be Cell 2->5->8, another one the complete clip. For those cases, the navigation is exactly as intended.

You could maybe implement all of that with cell commands, but that seems more error prone and there is a limit of commands. You would have to add a check after every cell if the playback should continue (selecting the next cell or the previous cell) or return to the menu depending on the selected play path. Another problem would be that the displayed time does not match the playback time of the path.

Currently, for a project with one main menu and several sub menus, two titles are created. I agree that could be reduced to one, but this is certainly not in the category of “pressing issues”.