I see what you are saying, Ed, and I think you're right. The overlap looks like it would decrease as the lobe separation angle increases.
My curiosity generally ends at the exact point where I figure out that something is not right. Once I determine a part has been made incorrectly, I don't think much further about how things would behave with the incorrect part (which makes me a dullard, I suppose). I can't unsee, ignore, or forget about it-- it's a burr under the saddle that bothers me until it's set right.
What's curious to me is the effect that increasing/decreasing lobe center and the cam itself being advanced or retarded from the TDC/BDC centerline has on the powerband. I once ran a cam with a bunch of lift and a fair amount of duration ground on a 105* LC. It was meant to "tame" a giant set of heads, and failed pretty miserably in that regard. I also ran an FK8 advanced a couple of degrees from the cam card that ran like a scalded dog, but suffered from preignition.
These are games guys way smarter than me play around with to see what will happen. I don't know of anybody that would go to all the work to see how something obviously ground way off would work, although it would be really interesting from an academic standpoint.
There's an awful lot about camshafts I don't know. I really wish I knew more-- but I suspect that it's a bit like saying, "I really wish I knew more about how the pancreas worked". Cams are probably an entire field of study unto themselves, and I would suspect that there are dudes hiding deep in the bowels of car manufacturers who have devoted their entire careers to understanding them more fully. I don't need that level of expertise, but I have a lot of questions (Why are most cams ground with identical intake and exhaust lobes? What's magical about 107- 122* of lobe separation? etc.).
There's always something to learn.