HeHe, most of our flying is in the middle of the night ! Much of the turboprop night flying in the UK is non-airway so in practice you'd tend to get more direct routes anyway. STN straight up the east coast with Mil Radar was always a good way up to NCL rather than airway.
I use Jeppesen Flitestar for flight planning, and despite it being a professional system it still suffers from the algorithm problems of finding an automated route. I must confess as I look after the commercial side of our business I'm quite happy at the initial planning stages if a bit's added on for good measure so we don't get caught with fuel and engineering costs from an ATC re-route or hold which havn't been paid for
When we're tight on payload then I'll be looking for the short cuts.However you will find that RPLs often follow quite an "out-of-the-way" route as that's what the system demands, only to fly a more practical route every night (especially if you've come to an arrangement with local ATC).
Cheers
Jon
It proves that with these systems a trawl through the charts after the magic go button has been pushed is not a bad thing!