There are more subtle effects as well, in that if one randomly places nodes next to each other, and one has a choice between those nodes being mostly moderately efficiently packed or packed to an extreme of either well or poorly packed, one is more likely to be able to combine more of the nodes if one chooses the policy of extremism.
Extremism is a virtue in space efficient node packing.
The maximal shift policy is not applied to internal nodes, as extremism is not a virtue in time efficient internal node balancing.