Yes, there probably is alot to say for the placement of parts resulting in a decent autotrace in this case, so that now makes more sense, because if I hadnt worked through much of the traces by hand the parts would have been in a completely non efficient original placement, so that starts to make sense, the autorouter did similar routing to mine because my placement was already optimized.
On the subject of the crystal, I always place it right up near the pins, I noticed that the dumilanove places it approximately 8 mm from the pins, so the question I now have would the crystal still function if it was placed at the end of the chip closest to the 9 and 10 pins, IE parallel to the 14 and 15 pins, this results in a 14 -15 mm trace as opposed to the 8 mm trace of the dumilanove, would it still function?