Dilemma

Sorry, correction, being a bad egg in my opinion. I personally wouldn't deliberately impede a slower  or hold up a faster boat, no point and no glory in my mind.

edited for typo.

With great respect though (honestly) one can ask why is there much difference between (for example) sailor A using their boat's superior speed to cover another boat to win, and sailor B using their boat's superior tacking speed or light wind ability to win. It may seem that in one case the slower boat has almost no chance because it is slower, but in my club the opposite applies and the fast cat - the current world champ and former Olympic silver medallist - has almost no chance against me on my Radial. I happily roll tack when he can't, and I will sail up to him when he is stuck in a calm. Overall I seem to have about a 15% advantage on corrected time.  If he could overcome that and sail me down the fleet in a vital last race, good on him - it would just mean that I didn't sail well enough earlier.

There are so many different scenarios that it seems hard to state any strict rules about this sort of situation, IMHO. What, for example, if the sailors were both on Lasers but one was on a Radial?  What about if the race was held in 25 knots, in which the Radial is actually faster?  Can the Radial sailor then hold the big rig sailor back because although the Radial is faster on the water in those conditions, it's rated slower?  What about if it's gusty and 10-25, or 6 knots?  Where do we draw the line?

What about if the faster boat is a couple of kids in a beaten up old banger who have sailed brilliantly, and the slower boat is a big-budget PY bandit that normally has a huge advantage on that water?  If, for example, a couple of kids borrowed an old Tasar (which is a faster boat but not as good as a Laser on yardstick on our water) and could win the club championship by driving my Laser back, I'd congratulate them on sailing well.  I'd say that they were far more deserving winners than if, for example, I'd dragged my PY bandit class out of the shed, or bought a PY bandit.

Our attitudes towards these things are probably shaped by things such as whether we've done big-boat rating-rule racing (where optimising the boat to rate at the top of its class so that it can control the fleet is seen as perfectly valid, and where the big boats are often at a disadvantage in long races) and how seriously we take PY racing and club racing (which in my case is not at all).

You're dead right that the most important thing is to concentrate on friendship rather than winning trophies. Personally, that includes respecting the fact that other people have different opinions about things like match racing.