Comment by version_five

My takeaway is that many people would rather decide themselves than set a blanket policy, even if results are similar. I feel this way about most consumer searching- say a real estate search: you may have a good idea of the location and specs of the house you're looking for, but much better to set wider filters just in case something interesting comes along that's out of spec in some way. Even if effectively you only consider the ones that would have made it through a tighter filter. I'm not at all surprised this is true for online dating as well.