[adanthar]

You're missing the forest for the trees. Loss of FE is one of several factors but by no means the only one, and they are not even all quantifiable.

A weird example that should still intuitively make sense: It's an hour into an SNG with 300/600 blinds and, through an amazing coincidence involving eight way all ins preflop, the chip stacks look like this:

SB: 7000
You (BB): 2992
8 other people: 1 chip apiece

It's folded to the SB, who goes all in with two cards or possibly one card. You have aces. What do you do?

In this situation, I don't even have to look at the ICM to know it will say to fold, as will eastbay's tool. And yet, if you fold, three things will happen:

1)You will lose this 600 chips and the next 300 on the SB
2)The short stacks will sometimes bust and sometimes double up to 2, 4, or 8 chips while the blinds circle the table faster and faster and you keep folding every hand
3)You will eventually wind up all in with the luckiest short stack in a race for third while the big stack laughs at you and wins

So, of course you have to call. FE here is a non-factor except as to the big stack, and since he'll still have 4K chips left when he loses you won't be able to bust him before you hit HU. But guess what? In the meantime, you'll have done the same to him and taken away a lot more chips than just the ones you won with the aces.

Going back to the QJ hand, in other words, the reason QJ is not close is because of the winning percentage it has against a likely calling range. Against a certain opponent who folds Q9o but calls K8o, it's not so good because it will never be over 40-45% to win when you are called. Against almost everyone else, you either have way too much FE *or* are closer to even or favored in a flip that will give you even more FE when you do win it.

That's about as much as I'm ever going to write on this subject until I publish a book about it. If you don't get it from here, start by figuring out exactly why it is a bad idea to open push AK in level 1.