Variable panel paths have higher priority than real urls

I've run into an issue which i don't think is the intended behaviour of panel pages.

I create two panel pages

1) variable path: %/messages

2) regular path: archive

When i visit the url:

archive/messages

it displays panel 1, I feel the intended behaviour should show panel 2.

Looking at the code in the panel_pages_menu function, i see the comments indicate real url's should be higher priority but the code itself doesn't do this.

I managed to get the intended behaviour by adding a check to see if the current path matches a panel without variables in the url. If it does I just return an empty items array, but i'm sure there must be a more elegant way.

Ben