I just completed a full playthrough of Daikatana v1.2 this month. The bots needed some handholding but it never took more than a couple of seconds to get them out of any given room. I didn't experience any elevator or door kills.
What I used were a lot of 'come' and 'stay' commands. Normally I'd have them following just fine, but eventually I'd turn a corner they'd have some trouble with. At that point I'd tell both bots to 'stay' (both bots need to be commanded individually), and then tell the closest one to 'come' to me. About 50% of the time that would clear things up. It's like it resets the bot or something.
If that didn't work, I'd tell the bot to 'stay' again and then walk up fairly close to it so that there's nothing between me and them. Giving it a 'come' command would then get them off the obstruction and I could proceed to move them forward. Once clear, I tell the now free bot to stay and work on getting the other bot out. This probably sounds like a lot but doesn't take too long in practice, especially if you've mapped most of the bot commands to your mouse (I use a 3rd party utility to bind mouse buttons 4 &5).
During my playthrough, I encountered bots getting stuck on the lip of map prefabs on two occasions (a fountain & a camp fire). It's like they forgot to bake in the map hints for the bot to jump out. While you can push a bot off a ladder it seems impossible to push them up a shallow stair. I had to load a save on both of those. :(
Regarding items and the 'get' command, I found that bots would only pick up them up if they were close to me and the targeted item. I also found it helpful to draw a weapon with a crosshair for purposes of pointing as I'd miss 50% with the 'get' command and the daikatana. It seems a fair number of items they'd normally pick up are placed where the bots can't get them (not always obvious). They seem to only be able to pickup low tier weapons. Getting Superfly and Mikiko to use health stations is essential.