Rpg Maker Developers Group

Hi hi! been a minute since I've been on the forums, got burnt out on development for a while but I'm getting back to it!

I've been struggling with this one section for a while (contributing factor to my hiatus on dev work) and I was hoping there might be a better solution out there? I've tried pretty much every pathfinding plugin out there (kotc's which I had a bizarre series of bugs with and ultimately didn't even end up functioning most of the time, schach pathfinding which got stuck more than rpg maker's built-in pathfinding did, theoallen's which I couldn't get to work either, and the only one I've found but haven't tried is this visual pathfinding by undermax which I was going to purchase to try and see if it worked the way I wanted, but their art is AI generated and I'd rather deal with RMMZ's default pathfinding than financially support that) and nothing has functioned properly.

The section in question is rather large, a maze sitting pretty at 95x84 (with a buffer of 6-8 tiles at the edges so the screen doesn't shift awkwardly at the edges when I have it zoomed in, a large amount of real estate is actually just walls so you can't see over them) and the mechanic itself is a sort of hide and seek - you explore the maze to find a character a few times, and then you have to find a place to hide yourself. The goal is to have the character search through the maze for you with pseudo-random paths (not actually random movement, I have him path to point A, then check to see if he should go to point B or C, and so on)

Initially I did this with move routes, which was painful, clumsy, and inexplicably broke at random, now I'm transitioning over to points of interest with the built-in RMMZ pathfinding and move route scripts, but it loves getting stuck on walls and I need to separate it into much smaller pieces for it to stop running back and forth and entirely killing the tension (alongside never actually ending the section, because the character needs to finish its sweep of the maze before the next sequence begins) which poses a similarly tedious problem to move routes.

Is there literally ANY way to have better pathfinding in-engine? I am willing to pay to have a plugin commissioned for this. Below is an exported map image if it helps, I have it randomly pick a path at every crossroads so outside of the few long, straight corridors he's only moving a maximum of around 20 tiles per command ideally. This should help with the issue I've heard of where complex pathfinding can cause lag.

My current system runs on a parallel so the player can, if they want to, decide to creep out of their hiding spot while he searches (and I can follow him around while playtesting to make sure things are working, which they are not) and I included an exported image of the map (so, without any event markers, but there are none that restrict movement outside of one stopping the player from hiding in the starting area that leads out of the maze in the top right and the event that searches starts below the hitbox for this) at the bottom of this post.

Ideally it would also be able to be stopped by a trigger, ex. a self switch or some other external factor since I have the event being moved around via another event and just handling the command to activate the line of sight plugin I'm using for him to be able to actually react when he finds the player but I can probably find a workaround for this if I need to.

If I've been unclear about anything, I would be happy to clarify where I can! Also, if I mistagged the post, let me know? I'm still a bit new to actually posting on the forum.
TL;DR: I'm looking for pathfinding that works in areas bigger than a single screen's width and doesn't want to push me down the stairs. thank you kindly!