In my own modules I found it convenient to have an additional wildcard "%" when checking for paths.
The idea is that "*" can be just any sequence of characters, while "%" is any sequence of characters that does not contain a slash "/" symbol.

node/%/edit
vs
admin/*

Of course this can be taken further and further (to the point of using regular expressions or even load callbacks), but in general these two wildcards have been sufficient for my projects.