its luck based for sure but at least you don't have to re roll 10 times to eve start your run. I promise in 10 runs the stars will align and you will get good rng and a solid speedrun. That being said in this category rng is arguably less important than the best starting team comp (which I wont tell you). Also don't think of pathfinding as being as simple as choosing the path with the least enemies. When you are trying to evolve both your mons during the run you need to make sure you find the most efficient way to get all of the shards while also minimizing hard fights. You'll need to look through the entire map and make a path quickly or else you lose time but not too quickly or you miss things. Also seras got a 6:33 by getting a harvester (+50 str need I go on??) in the very beginning of the game but my comp was better than him so despite worse rng my run was only 6 seconds behind his.