Does softening the front and stiffening the rear actually loosen up a car, or am I reading this backwards?

You are running into a classic confusion about the difference between spring rates and damping rates when trying to correct handling balance. The intuition that a stiff shock always means more grip is often wrong beacuse you are thinking about energy absorption, not control. When the rear steps out, it means the rear tires are losing traction and the car is rotating faster than intended. If you stiffened the rear rebound too much, the tire would still experiance sudden, sharp loading and unloading during the corner, leading to sudden slip. Stiffening the rebound is about controlling how quickly the suspension settles after a bump or load transfer, wich helps keep the contact patch stable and loaded correctly, preventing the quick unload that kills traction. It's about managing the movement, not just adding stiffness. Regarding the front end, the idea of softening the rebound to reduce understeer is related to letting the weight transfer to the outside tire happen more progressively. If the front end is too stiff, it resists the squat and dives aggressively, which can quickly overwhelm the available grip. Softening the rebound allows the chassis to settle and load the tires more gradually as you turn in. This smooth loading can keep the front end pointed where you want it longer. However, if you do that too much, you lose turn-in response, which is why most setups involve tuning both sides of that handling equation.

All these settings are highly non-linear. Adjusting a component for understeer might have a completley unexpected effect on oversteer in another scenario because you are shifting the proportion of total grip assigned to each axle. Think of it as a balancing act between front and rear traction allocation. Your idea of adjusting tire pressures is a very practical way to manage this because it directly alters the effective spring rate and tire stiffness in real time without changing parts.

generaly, when trying to tighten up a loose rear end, increasing the rear rebound and increasing the rear tire pressure are usally the first steps to keep the rear planted under load. Conversely, if the front is just pushing wide, you might look at managing the front damping to ensure the weight is distributed smoothly into the turn, while also making sure the tires have enough pressure to handle the corner loads.

This kind of makes sense to me now. I once cranked the clickers way up on the back of my old coupe thinking harder equals grippier, and the thing felt like it was hopping sideways over every bump instead of sliding smoothly. Backed it off and it got calmer right away. So the shock is more like a damper on a door hinge than a spring, keeping things from slamming around? That mental picture finally clicked for me. If that's roughly right, how do you know when you've gone too soft and it starts flopping around instead?

The thing that finally made shock adjustments click for me was a cheap tire pyrometer. I'd be guessing wheather a change helped, then I started taking temps across the tread after a few laps and the answers were just sitting there. One car I had would overheat the outside edge of the front right tire, and softening the front rebound a touch evened the temps out and the push went away. Without the numbers I would have gone the wrong way for sure. Also keep a notebook with every clicker change and what the car did. My memory always lies to me by the third run of the day.