It's not quite on your topic, but if you look, you'll find some offerings that involve an incredible number of connections.
For example, I was booking a flight GEG to either CVG or DAY (either works for us) several years ago and I ran across one published offering booked through a major carrier that involved four connections for an A to B distance of ~2000 miles.
I wanted to book it since I wanted a flight on one of the aircraft that would have been involved, but I didn't since the connecting time at SEA would have been only thirty minutes, which was less than I was comfortable with at an airport I wasn't familiar with.
The flight would have been dirt cheap.
I was searching for flights to the Carribean one year and actually saw one involving a codeshare with JAL, which featured a connection through Tokyo. IIRC, it routed DAY-JFK, and went international from there. It then routed back through maybe LAX. This was actually available to purchase. I kid you not.
Turn off all of the filters on a site like Kayak and you'll be amazed at some of the strange routings available for purchase.
What they have in common is that they're cheap and they're slow since they often take you way out of the way of your destination.