Hi,
The purpose of one's handicapping is to get to a situation whereas the assigned probs for each entrant and the actual result show the least amount of variance and Once you have done this there is no more amount of work to be done in the handicapping arena, its then a matter of seeing the imbalances within the pools. As you so rightly have pointed out the further you get from the Fav the worse JP goes in assigning the right probabilities, we just take different routes to find this Golden spot