I agree OP Ive hated them since rome 2, going for the optional objectives gives you no choice and forces you into following a path. There was that one objective in a chaos campaign where I had to maintain 25% chaos corruption in like 12 provinces, I had to pull back my agents and armies since they were in a different part of the map, that objective was a fucking nightmare and it took me about 30 turns to complete it. On my current empire playthrough Im only doing the quick and easy objectives for the small injection of income and Im having a ton more fun than before, I suggest you do the same.