Incidentally, a pawn leaving the assigned area while on the way to somewhere is because only the destination is checked for validity. That is, they will only do a thing in an allowed area, but traveling doesn't matter. I have guinea pigs, for example, assigned to two non-contentious areas. They will freely travel between those two blocks, but will only gaze in an assigned areas. They can't even stop in an area where they are not allowed (under normal circumstances).
Rimworld
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Because they gotta go all the way around the rim of the world man, just is what it is.
Vanilla Rimworld pathfinding is bullshit. It gets even worse during fights, as pawns will move unnecessarily too close to the enemy, and get wrecked as a result. Or they shortcut through the freezer.
For DF-like path priorities, there's Path Avoid.
There's also a clean pathfinding mod
There's a bunch of them actually:
The second one is up to 1.4 but comments in the Steam page report it working for 1.5 too. You can either edit the version manually or use something like No Version Warning alongside it.
I'm not sure how they interact with Path Avoid, I never tried them together, it might be worth a try though.