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To translate the code that cagatay posted in his answer:

The trajectory_planner generates plenty of trajectories, and chooses one to follow. Without simple_attractor, it tries to choose a trajecotry which both advances the robot to the goal AND also stays on the global path. With simple_attractor, the robot just moves towards the goal, discarding the global path. As long as you move in circles without obstacles you would not notice.

So it is a setting that was introduced for debugging only, and should not be used.

Also note that you are using the trajectory_planner_ros, and if you have a choice you should rather configure move_base to use the dwa_planner_ros. The code base is a cleanup of trajectory_planner_ros, and future development will continue to improve the dwa code, not the trajecotry_planner_ros code.