Never mind... Just go AFAYC

Question

n O . h t h D i c e
X y Z h O i r o n .
p s a Y B w o r d k
i T . G r O W I T n
m Z B L e e I . i i
E i u A w I T m m r
a l a S i s H a i d
n a S H R I n K K I
L e r O u M E P e A
l . i p I z z l R .

"Here, solve it."

"But... I don't know where to start, nor where I'm heading to."

"Never mind... Just go as far as you can, and as fast as you can."

"Well... May I ask for further hints?"

"NO, THIS IS NOT ALLOWED!"

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Above is the original question. Below are hints.

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Hint 1:

One crucial tag is omitted in purpose (could be added later as further hint).

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Hint 2:

Far = Longest
Fast = Shortest

... What!?

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Hint 3:

Two numbers are involved: $1$ and $\sqrt{2}$.

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Hint 4:

@OmegaKrypton mentioned this in the comment.
The chess tag is again not the correct tag, but could be very weakly relevant.
The knight move, however, is totally irrelevant, since it only involves one number: $\sqrt{5}$.

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Hint 5:

The most important hint so far is Hint 0.

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Hint 6:

The missing tag is mazes.
To keep it as a hint, I don't add it to the tags.

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Hint 7:

What are the "walls" of the maze?
It's given in Hint 0...

Answer 1

 A L o s t E n s
 b R A a n B . i
 O m y M B s Q B
 s L I P P E w l
 I i s . e N Q e
 D E N i e D r Y
 K t h X M E N .
 C T . R t r a c
 

With regards to the hints, "NO, THIS IS NOT ALLOWED!" means that Capital letters are not allowed - they are the walls in your maze. As found by Deusovi, the message within your maze is "answer with a similar puzzle". So, I've created a similar puzzle as my answer. The idea of "go as far/fast as you can" is:
1.   Find the two points within the maze, which have the longest A* distance between them, with diagonal movement allowed.
2.   Trace the A* path, and you have your answer.
3.   A* distance is minimizing the distance of a path between two points, so it will opt to skip two straight movements (distance $2$) in favor of a single diagonal movement (distance $\sqrt2\lt2$)
4.   On the other hand, you do want to maximize the A* distance, so you will end up with a pretty long path.

In the similar maze puzzle I designed, the maximum length A* path between two points is as follows:

 - _ _ _ _ _ _ _
 _ _ _ a n _ _ _
 _ m y _ _ s _ _
 s _ _ _ _ _ w _
 _ i s _ _ _ _ e
 _ _ _ i _ _ r _
 _ t h _ _ _ _ .
 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
 

Edit: according to later comment by OP, "." is a valid character (isn't a wall in the maze). So, I fixed my answer by replacing a "." with "X". Furthermore, it seems that this allows the following constraint: find the fastest/furthest path that ends with "." The original puzzle has a path that ends with ".", equal to "answer with a similar puzzle." Therefore, I have revised my answer to end with "." as well.

Answer 2

If you look at

only the lowercase letters, a message can be traced.



There are a few 'false paths', but the longest possible message says "answer with a similar puzzle". (No similar puzzles come to mind, but this is apparently everything to be extracted from the puzzle.)