Hi,
which version of batman are you using? And you should provide us with more details. Just saying Link is 'poor' or 'good' is very unprecise. Remember: A direct route with 6 Megabit performs similar to a two-hop link with 12 Megabits on each link, since no retransmissions have to be made.
Yes, this is true; anyway suppose this scenario
A----> B ----> C
where: A --> B and B --> are 800 kbps links and: A---->C is a 500 kbps link
Suppose we have to send 100 packtes form A to C
if the direct link A---->C is chosen we suppose a 100 packets transmission while chosing B as router (repeater) we would expect a 100+100 packets transmission! What above is well right using that bandwidht values (6Mb) but with poor/lossy links we have also to consider the IP datagrams loss at network layer ---> which will cause TCP retransmits at higher layers (think to http connection) just based on that links. For this reason maybe a kind of "bandwidth threshold" can help in preferring a 500_Kb per link mulit-hop path rather than a 300_Kb link direct path.
This is a my opinion elektra, no criticism... all what we want is only give hints and tips in order to improve batman. Ok?
-- Antonio