arXiv:2610.08189v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Approximate functional dependency (AFD) strength measures are commonly used to prioritize candidate dependencies, including when selected dependencies support downstream tasks such as error detection. This practice implicitly assumes that dependencies ranked higher by strength are also better candidates for the task they are intended to support. We test this assumption directly for error detection. We evaluate detection value through precision and recall without imposing a single weighting on different error types, and introduce an explicit false-positive/false-negative cost only when a single candidate-selection objective is required. Across three real-world relations from an established AFD benchmark, $1{,}155$ corruption-and-detection runs, and $513{,}480$ candidate-level evaluations, we find a clear asymmetry. Strength measures tend to track precision positively, but their associations with recall are substantially less stable, with both magnitude and direction varying across measures and experimental settings. Strength-based prioritization is also unreliable at the ranking level: top-$k$ sets chosen by strength often have little overlap with those favored by actual detection performance, and strength-based selections can incur substantial regret. An important part of the recall mismatch is associated with structural detection opportunity under the candidate equivalence-class partition, which tracks recall more consistently overall than the strength measures we evaluate. Corruption mechanism and several static structural properties account for selected effects but do not provide a common explanation across settings, leaving part of the mismatch unresolved. Overall, AFD strength and detection value are distinct and should be evaluated separately.