Alternatively, associate some confidence value with the statistics and make conservative choices when confidence is low and/or the expected difference is small.
Sometimes a sequential scan is faster than index lookups for each item. But the sequential scan is a risky gamble, whereas the index lookups have robust performance characteristics. It's not always clear which choice is the conservative one, but often it is.
I think it should always be clear which open would scale better for additional rows over what the estimated row count is. We should always know this because we already cost for N rows, so it's possible to cost for N+1 rows and use the additional costs to calculate how the plan choice will scale when faced with more rows than expected.
Sometimes a sequential scan is faster than index lookups for each item. But the sequential scan is a risky gamble, whereas the index lookups have robust performance characteristics. It's not always clear which choice is the conservative one, but often it is.