Looking at the example you provided and as you are in max 2017 - just click with shift held down at the start edge and drag to the end edge, man :smile:
It works great for me, whenever you want to add an 'orientation point' when it could fork more ways, just click (shift is pressed the whole time): On the examples you provided, it would work with one click for start and one for end, with longer loops maybe one click inbetween, so I wouldn't say that it's that much slower -…