what I have found is that a lot of route owners are overly obsessed with proof of passage and not allowing any shortcuts. My advise is always to just try to get it approved the way you want and make changes if required for approval. I have only been asked to change one route, and I refused. And in the end, I got my way. I like the challenge of placing my controls so that my preferred route is the shortest route, but that's not always possible. It turns out that you don't really have to do that, routes with significant possible short cuts are allowed, up to 10 percent of the distance between the relevant controls.
At one point I only did free route perms. The problem I had was that there are a couple of roads that I dislike that are shorter than anything else. It's the curse of living in a valley. And I dislike having too many controls. I have one perm that has a nice turnaround point, but when I went to a free-route, I had to take it across a river and go pretty far down the other bank just to keep it so the shortest distance was over 200k. Dropped the idea of making that free route. If you over-constrain it with controls, all of a sudden it's not really free route. What I do is mention variations that people can take if they don't mind not getting credit for the extra distance. Which they wouldn't on a free route anyway. One objection to free routes that I can respect is that the shortest route is probably not the owner's preferred route, and the owner should point riders towards their preferred route. I always provide a cue sheet for my preferred route, and the shortest route cue sheet is available.
Can an RBA put a brevet on the calendar with a week's notice? I mean, let's say I got three or four riders to agree to do a 200k ride next weekend, we could ask the RBA to put something on the calendar and he could accommodate us? I assume it has to come from a list of approved routes, but I also assume there plenty to choose from, at least in this area. Then, once it's in the calendar, anyone can ride it.
I think I saw that RUSA requires a week's notice, and $5 for insurance for each rider. DC is putting on extra rides too, but they didn't have an R12 program. Not sure exactly how their calendar is laid out. They are doing woodbine-dillsburg twice in coming weeks. I'm not particularly fond of that route, but maybe that's because the last time I rode it, a town was holding a Christmas parade and there was tons of traffic due to that