Quote Originally Posted by iopq
If you run 17/13 but you have post-flop skills to back it up, you might win more than a 12/7 because you'll be sacrificing a pre-flop edge to get heads-up with opponents who are bad post-flop.
The 17/13 doesn't have to give up value pre-flop in order to gain it back later when opponents play bad post-flop because there are enough situations to mine for gold pre-flop where the 12/7 is afraid to look. For example, when I noted that OP should steal the blinds more, he replied defensively like he didn't want to expand that part of his game. The simple truth is that an attempt to steal of 35% does not have to encounter any -EV spots pre-flop when stealing, but OP is content with his 28% attempt to steal anyway.

There are tons of other spots where people seem to just be afraid of expanding their game when it is blatantly +EV. In the beginning, I believe the 12/7 avoids a lot of these so-called marginal situations in order to have a lower variance ABC game and to learn that basic ABC game well. The problem is that it's easy to get stuck and not want to advance your game beyond that. But this just goes back to what I said earlier about people not really wanting to improve.