But you care a bit about that path if you're up close to cell towers or power lines, surely? You at least care that your path doesn't cross a minimum distance threshold from the object.
Well, sure. I don't really mean we don't care about the path, we care quite a bit about the path, mainly that it gets from point A to point B directly and doesn't hit things, and that it is somewhat as smooth as possible (easy on the actuators to follow). We have a 3d map of the environment we build from the ground robot to directly test against while we are flying to make sure we don't hit things.