Most of the time I just want to concentrate on “making a game” and not with the nuts and bolts under the hood. In general I’d rather use a “black box” to do a task than spend time coding it myself.
But sometimes it’s good to know what’s going on under the hood. I’ve created games with pathfinding elements and used an existing pathfinding library so I didn’t have to mess with A* code — but other times I needed something more specific. That’s when having some actual programming KNOWLEDGE is a good thing.
The link below takes you to one of the best explanations of A* pathfinding that I’ve ever seen. It’s the thing that “opened my eyes” a while back.