The problem I see is that each of these new functions has a single caller, and the only one that looks like it could have a performance advantage is list_copy_move_nth_to_head() (which is the weirdest of the lot). I'm inclined not to have any of these single-use functions unless a performance case can be made for them.
Yeah, maybe this is the reason I failed to devise a query that shows any performance gain. I tried with a query which makes the 'all_pathkeys' in sort_inner_and_outer being length of 500 and still cannot see any notable performance improvements gained by list_copy_move_nth_to_head. Maybe the cost of other parts of planning swamps the performance gain here? Now I agree that maybe 0002 is not worthwhile to do.
