I think I better take this one
Talking from a personal perspective, and I presume this applies for most people but I can't be sure of course, not long after I joined
apterous, I realised I was a bit shit at letters and conundrums compared to naturally better (or indeed more practised) players, but pretty good at numbers as I've always been pretty good at mental arithmetic, so to make myself more competitive when playing online I was like, right, I'm going to get really good at either 6 small or 4 large to kind of capitalise on what small advantage I did have.
What made me go for 4L, and again, this is presumably the same for other players, was seeing all the clever tricks you can do involving 4 large numbers, e.g.
James Martin's classic 4L solve and when I was quite new to the online game, I seem to remember Graeme Cole doing an example of what's called
a 937.5 trick (hover over Jack's declaration of 936 to see his method) before I had heard of it, and it blew my mind. I wanted to learn how to do these (at least to me at the time) very impressive solutions.
After time the tricks become very intuitive, like you show anyone like Jon O'Neill, Jack Hurst, Jack Worsley, Dan McColm, etc, a solve like "100 75 50 25 3 10 @894" and they'll have solved it after a split second due to memory/intuition/experience. Most players would sit there straining themselves for 30 seconds and not get it at all. Actually, it's the same trick as in round 10 in
the last-ever old-15 format, so people may be slightly more aware to it at this current moment in time, but I'd still say that most people would miss it.
Final point really about 4 large is that due to the fact it's fundamentally more difficult than 1 large and 2 large, and especially because of the fact it often relies more on recalling memory or intuition rather than raw calculation, it lends itself brilliantly to be played on TV. Calculation under pressure is harder, the memory part of your brain holds up well under pressure, and if you're playing a retired English teacher from Leamington Spa rather than a 20-year old maths student from Cambridge, I think it's safe to presume that you have the maths advantage and from a strategical standpoint, it's wise to accentuate this advantage by choosing a more outlandish numbers game.
Well, that turned into an essay pretty quickly. Jen'd be proud of me.