I have not seen the pathfinding problem fixed in any game to date. In NWN 2, summoned creatures were almost unusable because they kept blocking doors and hallways, In Dragon Age, I wanted to smack the archers, always stopping their move and beginning to fire right in the doorway, In Skyrim, followers keep losing their way, it keeps to be annoying in Diablo 3 and in Torchlight 2...
IMHO, the fix here would be for the devs to simply admit the fact: Nope. We can't. Good pathfinding AI is still a few years in coming, hell, a decent pathfinding common sense has never been done. Lets just cut the losses and make a few workarounds. Like, make is possible to move *through* friendly NPCs (realism be damned!) or have a "instant party collect" button. Not sexy solutions, but I'm not holding my breath until someone finally comes up with a pathfinding AI that works