On the other hand, he was flying in a different direction to the simulator route, so maybe he figured they would recover those, and then it is a brilliant false clue when it appears you were trying to hide it.
If his goal was to make sure the plane was never be found, and baffle the hell out of everyone, he certainly did a thorough job of it.
It is more likely that he was trying different directions (because there isn’t any info about that) than he’d ever flown before, or wanted to see what happened outside normal flight lanes. There’s literally no reason to believe he was setting up a suicide run. It will be nice if the black box is ever found though. To do that, they’ll have to look in the South China Sea, which is where the Chinese shot down the plane.