Philip Dunstan

Though she didn't cover the topics of ease of authoring or maintaining, Andrea Schiel did a great breakdown of the applicability of common AI approaches to different types of game problems in her chapter in the recent Game AI Uncovered: Volume One book.

Definitely some other techniques either enforce modularization (eg utility or planners) or have a structure that is more easy to control (eg HSFM or State trees).

I see it like code. If you have a small number of developers authoring behaviors and they are able to keep the whole behavior in their mind then its fine without restrictions. If either of those are not true then you need to enforce stricter structure and modularization.

Two months ago I was on the team that shipped #StarWarsOutlaws. I tried to play the game on release but all I could see were the bits that weren't as good as we wanted. Played again for the first time since release today, and I can finally enjoy the game for what it is. Super proud of what we made.

It depends a lot on the skills and knowledge of the authors. If you have technically strong designers, then BTs are great. They allow a lot of expression for the author and with the right tools are one of the easiest approaches to tune and debug.