What is the point in spending 2,300 Nook Miles for the custom design permit when you can just kick dirt over it by pressing Y?  It’s the same as dropping the design from the Design app.

The major difference is that you can drop/place things on them when using the path option. Also, looks like visitors to your town can’t kick the path away, even if they’re a best friend. But I’m not sure if visitors can mess with regular patterns like they could in past games

Idk, you can place items on them when your drop them from the designer app too.  Just seems like a waste of miles to me to do the same thing.

Just read on another forum that once you take the hat off and exit the island designer app, pressing Y shouldn’t cover it with dirt.  However that thread was from 4 days ago, which I believe was before the last update.  Maybe this is just a glitch..?

Lol in that case I guess you’re really only paying for the convenience of getting to place them quicker. I don’t using patterns because it’s too easy to kick away, but the mile cost seems worth it enough, I guess

the main difference is if you drop a pattern from the designer app onto the ground, the full pattern will display no matter what. if you use the path tool, and your pattern has at least 1 pixel of transparency on it, you can overlay it on a regular path and it'll crop to match the shape. that way you can get those natural rough grass edges and rounded corners on your custom paths, instead of straight sharp edges