It's not the Engineers fault, they were just following John Henry.  He was really drunk at the time.

(hides empty cases of Quendar and Pariden Wine)

Who says we were drunk? *hic* I swear *hic* that it was John Henry's fault.

(aside) Who *hic* is John Henry, *hic* anyways?

~ random engineer in the Department of Highway Construction, Wildlands Division, Dangerous Duty Section (thanks for the Dangerous Duty Pay scale and unsupervised triple overtime [for building the highway by hand through the wilds in a season], six times more than normal! Of course we want to go through the wildlands - it's not like the monsters ever attack us! By the way, what happened to George? One moment, he was here, the next we have a beautiful Ice Sculpture).

On a more serious note, yes it would be nice if the roads laid out by the autoroad function were placed more intelligently, but I don't think that that will happen. You might try giving a hero Path of the Governor and hope for the Road Builder trait, or try to find a recruitable hero who already has the Road Builder trait (not sure that that is the exact name, but it's something like that). I don't know how well this works, since I've never tried using it.

The pathing algorithm certainly seems to avoid rivers at all costs, if you let it decide how your units are going to go to that very far away location that's just on the other bank of this river that we can take a year or two to walk around. And I suspect that the road placement algorithm is at the least based upon the pathing algorithm.

That path makes a lot of sense actually. I think that it's impossible to build a diagonal bridge so it can only cross the river at straight angles, so that means that it could only waypoint out of Erirark at that angle.

From that point it could have gone straight south and then crossed the river for a shorter path (Still inside Wildlands mind you) but since that resource was nearby, it snapped to the resource for prettier roads. If it wasn't for Wildlands that's actually almost the best road you could build.

Maybe it makes sense algorithmically, but that's about all.  It makes no gameplay sense whatsoever.  It's not the path an individual would create for themselves.  The roads, which have options to remain mostly inside my faction's influence actually end up almost entirely outside of my country's influence  And al this gains you no benefit while exposing you to several problems.  Your units are dealing with the wildlands monsters.  The roads through the wildlands, because they're considered "enemy territory", actually provide no movement benefit.