You're way ahead of me, I really just dabbled, and I kinda embraced the inefficiency. Though when I did the calculation on the GPU the bottleneck kind of became reading pixels of the texture data for individual agents to make decisions on - otherwise, the potential field updated way faster than the agents could move, and local minima didn't exist long enough to matter. But of course that all really depends on the game map (resolution) and gameplay, and even just having requirements like map sections where some agents don't fit through, while others do, might make it kinda useless.
I think the main power is that potential fields reduce the complexity of the calculation to the map and the number of goals, with an infinite number of agents being able to use that at little cost, but you pretty much always have to build additional pathfinding on top of it. For example, for some games it might be fine for agents to follow the potential field generally, but every tick one of them gets to use Dijkstra/A*, and if that points the other way it follows that path until coming close to another agent or something. Too much efficiency can be off-putting, but also be too predictable and easy to exploit as a player, that's also worth noting. But of course, I'm kind of rationalizing my lack of deeper knowledge here, I'd love to be able to do it perfectly, and then tone that down for realism/gameplay. Alas :)
I think the main power is that potential fields reduce the complexity of the calculation to the map and the number of goals, with an infinite number of agents being able to use that at little cost, but you pretty much always have to build additional pathfinding on top of it. For example, for some games it might be fine for agents to follow the potential field generally, but every tick one of them gets to use Dijkstra/A*, and if that points the other way it follows that path until coming close to another agent or something. Too much efficiency can be off-putting, but also be too predictable and easy to exploit as a player, that's also worth noting. But of course, I'm kind of rationalizing my lack of deeper knowledge here, I'd love to be able to do it perfectly, and then tone that down for realism/gameplay. Alas :)