rhm

As long as you stay within certain limits, a lot of this stuff just doesn't matter much. For me, the difficulty is knowing when I get close to those limits. With that in mind, wide tires are simply much more forgiving.

Case in point: fat tires run at significantly lower pressure than thin ones. Therefore when punctured the air leaks out of a fat tire at a slower rate than out of a thin one. Furthermore, there's a lot more air in a fat tire than in a thin one. So when a fat tire is punctured, more time and distance goes by before you notice anything wrong. All that's very nice. But even so, there comes a time when so much air had been lost that handling deteriorates, and at that point the shin hits the fan.

Until that point, the relative widths of tire and rim aren't really critical to anything. Even so, I'm sure there's a point where a wide rim supports a squishy tire better than a narrow one. I hope I never find out the hard way!