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Greg,
You have a wonderful way with words and analogies!
I understand your question but have read nothing that indicates the answer. I'd speculate that the answer depends on what treatment you get.
If you are trying to wipe out and replace all of your cells (radiation/chemo/transplant) then it may not matter how many lines with which problems you have. The goal is to wipe them out and replace them lock, stock, and barrel.
If you are taking a drug that has been found to work for a particular abnormality (Revlimid for 5q minus) then you'd hope to have no other abnormalities. But that's the exception. Even when other MDS drugs work, I don't know how they work, and I'm not sure that the researchers know either. They may have developed the drugs based on theories of our biology but it often seems that they rely on trial and error to find what's statistically beneficial to patients, no matter how it works. So knowing whether it targets one line vs. another may be beyond what we can determine without doing trials to find out.
As long as you're rolling the dice my instinct says to root for one cell line with multiple problems rather than splitting the problems up among cell lines. I think of the bad guys as the abnormal cells, not their individual problems, so the fewer bad guys the better.
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