[ijdykeman]

I think it’s important to point out that it’s NP hard, because if you don’t know that, who’s to say that some efficient, exact algorithm does not exist? Given that because the problem is NP hard, no fast and exact algorithm exists, so we can try to explore possible tradeoffs.

This post explores one point in the design space where you trade away exactness for speed. You’re suggesting trading away generality for exactness and speed by restricting the classes of possible inputs and putting in extra work to make the classes you do support very fast to process. A totally valid option.