I agree with and enjoy 95% of your posts, Red Rick, but I think your anti-Froome bias clouds your analysis a bit, causing you to selectively conflate what we know after the fact with what was known before the fact. This has allowed you to create an unbreakable process flow that invariably confirms Froome's lack of panache. A non-comprehensive selection:
- 2013 Tour stage 8 - despite never having won a GT on the road, a poor lead up to the 2013 Tour, an all-time opponent in Contador, who we did not yet know would be so weak in that Tour, Froome risked nothing by going flat out from 5km on Ax3 because he and the team somehow knew, without a doubt, that he was by far the strongest
- 2013 Tour stage 18 - with almost no incentive to do so, Froome attacked at~11km and ~9km once Porte dropped, meaning he had no team; ultimately, this backfired, as he bonked, and could have potentially lost the Tour if Quintana hadn't ridden harder or if Richie hadn't miraculously reappeared and secured an illegal feed
- 2014 Vuelta stage 20 - despite performing worse than not only Contador but also Valverde in the TT the day before, and being only 13 seconds ahead of Valverde, Froome risked nothing by repeatedly attacking Contador because he knew that he "would drop Valverde like a brick that day" (of course on Alpe d'huez in 2013, when they might have expected to dominate, it hadn't worked out that way...)
- 2018 Giro stage 14 - after starting in 12th position 3:20 back and with no reason for anyone to believe it would succeed, Froome attacked from 4.3km on a climb on which it is very easy to blow up, but, because it succeeded, the team must have known it would succeed; i.e., there was no risk because we have knowledge that it worked, meaning the probability of success was 100% all along
- 2018 Giro stage 18 - Froome starts 3:50 down after losing more time on Yates after Zoncolan but attacks 2km out to take back some time; no risk there, despite having had his team in breakaways the day before and having lost time on several stages and gained on only 1
- 2018 Giro Stage 19 - Froome starts 3:22 down and attacks solo from 80km out to win; even though he had performed worse than Yates and Dumoulin on most of the climbing stages, and by a more significant margin that the gap to Yates performance the day before, there was no risk involved in the attack because, of course, we know it worked, therefore, it had to work. Setting aside demonstrated form, the fact that Yates blew up spectacularly (indicating there was also that potential for Froome), the conventional wisdom regarding the superiority of riding in a group over solo, etc...
All this really is to say that, man, people should stop waiting and go for it! We know this all worked for Froome and that he was the strongest, because he tried! Who knows, maybe if MAL or Pogacar or Porte was going from 2km, 5km, 11km, 80km out like Froome did in those examples, and others, we'd be saying, well, MAL didn't risk anything because he was obviously the strongest person in the race...