I think my route was something close to 1270ly total, where that "standard" comes out at 1204.
Not sure what I did there to get a longer route
The "standard" route that I sent to PrimetimeCasual - which I'd originally intended to create a map of and post in the OP was:
Fullerene C60
Thrutis
Thrutis
Kongga
Rahu
Eranin
Bast
Epsilon Indi
Lave
Leesti
Wangal
HIP 110028
Ochoeng
A total of 1181LY and an estimate of 28 jumps in a 56LY ship (my spreadsheet only does estimates, it's not as clever as Esvandiary's EDTS, but it's quick and usually right)
Note that, I always optimise my routes by estimated jumps, rather than total distance and I think there were a few combinations of systems in the 'middle' bit where the distance varied, but not the total jumps.
I also pointed out to PrimetimeCasual that we'd often found in the past that travel between two bodies in the same system often takes longer than jumping out and back in, so if I'd been racing I'd have tried the following at least once:
Fullerene C60
Thrutis
Bast
Thrutis
Kongga
Rahu
Eranin
Epsilon Indi
Lave
Leesti
Wangal
HIP 110028
Ochoeng
This is a total 1271LY and an estimated 30 jumps, but avoids an interplanetary journey in Thrutis.
As Bruski isn't online at the moment, I'll mention that his route included an Eranin -> Leesti leg, which my route planner classed as "3 jumps", but he did in two using a White-Dwarf supercharge.
- have a reliable 'secret' route planning tool,
My 'secret' tool is just excel.
I make one of my Raikograms and then use excels "solver" plugin - you can set it up to solve travelling saleman problems by just shuffling through the destinations to brute force it.
It's a little unreliable, so I always give it a couple of goes, but I usually get a very similar route to those using EDTS. My "estimated jumps" just assumes that if you need more than 1 jump to get there, your average range will be a few LY less than max.
Running the solver only takes a few minutes, so I've never bothered with EDTS.
If the race only has a few stops, then it's just as easy to work it out manually. My rares-based races have all had quite a few stops though, which is why I offered to share my "standard" route with anyone who didn't fancy messing in excel / python.