The route length doesn't necessarily relate to the latency at the final destination. You can have a 15 hop route with 25ms of latency at the final destination, and a 5 hop route with 500ms of latency.

We talk about this here:

http://www.nessoft.com/kb/42

Even within a single target, intermediate hops might have higher latency than a hop further away. We talk about that here:

http://www.nessoft.com/kb/9