The recent flurry of path topics roots here - Alpinist routes marked as footpaths – Somebody 
followed a path presented in several maps based on openstreetmap data and found no path on location. (I have no idea how often that happens. I suspect, it not so rare in the backwoods.) So the inexistent path was deleted. Not much later, that path got recreated, geometry off by dozens of metres. Instead of going edit war, @Superfebs took to the forum.
I did invite @CAI_Salò to the forum and a very competent (from a mountaineers perspective) explanation posted in changeset comment. I turned that into a poll: – Is it fine to map pathless mountaineering routes as a highway=path? 20 out of 45 voters said, yes!
While I did vote “No”, I am not principally against such routes getting mapped. I just think, path is not the right tool.
From a mappers point of view, I fully understand why people use ways for that and not relations: Ways are a an ordered collection of nodes. Nothing can beat the ease of use.