Wow Necrokiller found a bug in the original Spider-Man's enemy AI routine, that too from the awful stealth section featuring Mary Jane. Bravo! Now think of all the brain dead instances of AI that I shared in the Cyberbug 2077 thread
Which is restricted by the point you start from in the first place which the player has no control over

Catapults are scattered all over the world map. There's no section that is deliberately preventing you from using it. Only the strongest catapults are limited to a few areas

Why isn't the speed always fastest?
I couldn't tell you. I don't have the game's performance profiler open in front of me to see whether it's due to an IO limitation. Perhaps the strongest slingshots are intentionally limited to areas with less nearby assets that can easily be streamed, or perhaps it's simply a design choice to ensure that getting from point A to B doesn't become trivial. Would also make the game shorter and quicker to beat
And why is the fastest speed still not anywhere close to the SSD on stage demo from SM? Why CerebralTiger, why?
That was using PS4 quality assets from the first game, and its purpose was not to show how fast traversal in Spider-Man 2 would be. The point you should be focusing on is that even with Spider-Man 2 being a game developed for the PS5 from the ground up with higher quality assets compared to Spider-Man Remastered, general traversal is faster. It was blatantly evident from the gameplay reveal at the PlayStation showcase

This is without even considering the pop-in that is visible throughout and far from the "pop-in free" streaming that CerebralTiger was hoping for LMFAOOO!
Nobody, not even Insomniac, claimed that the game would be pop-in free. There are other bottlenecks associated with that. Data isn't just being streamed in, it's also being drawn by the GPU. But what's impressive here is that even with the higher quality assets and faster traversal, pop-in isn't worse than in the first game (probably a bit better, in fact). And it's stutter-freeee

