I think shortest is probably a good proxy if we can't find something better but I think in an editor "easiest to understand" is probably what's actually important.
Not that I have any particular expectation that this algorithm does unexpectedly well at that.
Yes. That reminds me of lossy image compression: the real goal is to find a representation that looks as close as possible to the input image to the human eye. In practice, we use proxies.
Not all proxies are equally good. Eg just going by Hamming distance or L2 norm distance would be awful. Proxies that take more features of our visual system into account are going to fare better.
Not that I have any particular expectation that this algorithm does unexpectedly well at that.