A tad arrogant? I can understand why many people could make that the default judgement. I do indeed see that some latenight moderator has made his or her judgement, and fairly stuffed the thread into touch, pronto-like
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I am actually sick of seeing pilots hesitating during taxy at simple airports making up their mind where to go next. I don't mind a performance based decision smartly executed, if that's what it it might have been, but it wasn't.
Personally I think this was another late pilot at another simple airport where the big picture of taxyway layout and intersections between two parallel runways, one used as a taxyway by the jet traffic, just happened to escape him. We dillied and dallied and ultimately did nothing more complicated than leaving the apron on the exact same perpendicular that the aircraft entered on, crossing the parallel inactive directly from the apron, to arrive at the main runway at the exact point the aircraft left the runway when it arrived 30 minutes earlier on the reciprocal. Even when we reached the main runway it seemed someone was in two minds which way we would turn - right for takeoff or left for backtrack and take-off. Maybe it was just me of course having flown from this one too many times
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None of this is dictated by Smalltown's ATC of course - the airline often expresses its own runway preference 'on the fly' and as there's usually not much else occuring, take-off clearance is also often given early whilst taxying out.
As 2 or 3 or even 5 minutes surely can't be that valuable at the end of the day, I can only assume that perhaps a slot time was about to expire ...