It could also be interesting to target a tile some number of nodes in front of the player, so the monster will go to “cut the player off” sometimes. Maybe it could result in some interesting behavior if combined with your momentum idea. The goal of enemy AI is to be trick-able in a fun manner, right?

Of course, it is easy to come up with fun ideas for enemy AI, I think if you went after all of them you’d never have time to write the nice blog post.