I am confused about the value of "optimize" in relation to segment preferences. The discussion of optimize includes words about travel time and efficient.

I would like to set my segment preferences property to "shortest route" for all my stops. That is because using the default "quickest" often produces bizarre loops skipping stops that my route drivers reject. Ok, then I calculate route.

Question is: Should I skip using optimize if I calculate on shortest? An explanation of the subtlety here may be of interest to many forum users who are working on routing.

You have to Optimize first to set the order. This will always be based on Quickest Time (not Shortest Distance). Then after you have optimized the order, you can change specific segment preferences to take the shorter route instead of the "quickest". If you switch the order of these steps, I believe the optimization will wipe out your segment preferences, because with the changed order, the segments (and their properties) will be different.

Ideally there would be a way to optimize the order based on distance (as well as the current way, which I think is based on time). But currently there's not. :( Good feature idea.