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.
Once you hit a population of 50,000, you start to get bad traffic. Density then ramps up pretty quickly from there. Quite soon you'll have a population of 200,000, and the traffic is quite a lot worse, but not terribly bad.
The real horror comes when you start a region's great work. A significant number of people will leave the city in the mornings to work at the great work. If you are making a great work you are probably sending dozens of trucks with resources to it as well. The end result is you get easily 10x more vehicles leaving/entering the city. The queue to get in through the single lane off-ramp from the highway then ends up stretching all the way to the next city, and it takes a good 24 hours for the cars at the end to get in. It then ends up stabilizing, taking maybe 4-6 hours for someone to get into the city.
Also, a large number of cars 'just passing through' will use your city entrance as a 'quick' way to do a U-turn on the highway, blocking traffic even more.
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.