[archmaster]

Anecdotally, I've run a bunch of traceroutes and reverse traceroutes to different locations and they tend to follow the same AS paths — although sometimes the traceroute will surface more routing through your ISP (especially from college networks). In general you are correct, though, and I would love to explain more about hot-potato vs. cold-potato (and other interesting routing decisions) in the future. Either way, the results the reverse traceroute provides are good enough for the purposes of explaining the internet, IMO!

[incompatible]

I did a traceroute to how-did-i-get-here.net, and it went through a completely different network to the one they reported for the reverse.

[firebot]

Yup. Those paths are cached bidirectional.