Lightburn most efficient cutting firection

"going in all different directions"

I’ve found that the various Optimization Settings interact in peculiar ways, rarely proceeding in what seems the obviously best way.
In practice, however, the non-cutting travel speed is so much faster than the cutting speed that the laser spends most of its time cutting and very little time traveling, so I mostly give up and let the algorithm have its way.
Along those lines, try handing your collection of digits to the Arrange → Nest Selected tool and let it rearrange them in peculiar ways. Might save some material, even if the result won’t affect the overall job time by very much at all.