Yes, I've read rope kid's assertion that you can totally go the North Path, you just have to 'earn it'. Has that justification ever been more than "we want you to take another path so you can see our stuff"?
If we were actually concerned about you seeing "our stuff", we would not have designed the game around skipping huge sections of the crit path, killing literally any and every non-child NPC you come across, and having three+ routes to take to the end of the game. All of those things required us to do an enormous amount of up-front planning or they would completely fall apart in the end product. It is completely anti-"we want you to see our stuff".
We wanted sections of the Mojave Wasteland to feel sharply more challenging than others to add a sense of danger to how the player explored and to give them a sense of accomplishment when they surmounted a difficult obstacle. When a player talks about how they hopped north of Goodsprings, crept along murdering cazadores, dropped down into Bonnie Springs and took pot shots at Jackals while the raiders got torn apart, then rolled in amid the wreckage to find Love and Hate -- I think that is a much more interesting story than hearing how they moved from A to B to C along our crit path. But if there's no tension or challenge to it, there's not really much to tell.
