I'm with you, but is it possible this helps in some way with nozzle movement that might not be easily visible? Just trying to figure out why it would even consider this placement.
If I reduce the count one it will arrange them in a neat grid, albeit with one row shorter than the other. And there is an element of randomness, if you click the arrange button again it will sometimes place the outlier on the other side.
I have no idea what the fuck its thought process is.
There may be multiple solutions to the fitness algorithm it's applying. So you may sometimes see one and sometimes the other depending on some "random" variable.
You have the right idea! The slicer takes all printhead movements into account and likely shaves off a fraction of the total print time by positioning one object like this.
Yeah it drives me a bit insane too. I often end up just manually placing everything. I wish it had a mode where you roughly place things and it spaces them consistently without significantly changing their relative positions
Cura is guilty of this last part too. It'll flip parts around however it sees fit, which isn't ideal because then you get z-seams in all different areas, so matching parts no longer match.
I wouldn't call it a shameless ripoff, it's a fork. Which Prusaslicer was as well. I'm actually glad they did that rather than making yet another closed source slicer. That means that enhancements that Bambu puts in can very likely be ported over to Prusaslicer, and vice versa. It's a win for everybody.
Please note that the traveling salesman problem is NP hard, so the auto-arrange algorithm will never aim for a "perfect"/ fastest arrangement.
It just ensures that the parts have a minimum distance to each other while keeping them as close as possible to the center of the build plate