It must be a coincidence that I've done better with Free Tickets than a QP. To my mind, a Free Ticket is simply a QP that I didn't have to pay for because I won it by matching two winning numbers on a different ticket.
If players want to be picky about it, I guess they could call a QP that they paid for a "straight" QP. But that might offend some people, they might say it's "not politically correct" or some such gibberish.
I too have wondered if a line or two on a QP ticket I paid for somehow influenced the other numbers on the other lines on the ticket where I picked the numbers for some lines. (My ticket was mixed with both QP lines and lines I picked.)
Just to make matters worse, in New York they have a feature called a "partial-QP". If I picked two numbers on any given line, the terminal would automatically pick the other three numbers. If I picked one number, the terminal picked the other four. If I picked four, the terminal would pick the other one. To buy a partial-QP, you had to color in the QP box on the betslip, and however many numbers you wanted to pick. Most clerks had absolutely no idea players could do this, and would sometimes spot the box with only three numbers colored in. They'd then hand the betslip back to me and say "You gotta pick FIVE numbers sir!! You only picked three!" I'd then have to tell them "It's a partial QP" which they never heard of and some of them didn't believe me when I told them it would work. It wasn't until they actually ran the betslip through the terminal, and it printed out a ticket that they believed me. FF5 does NOT have this feature. I tried to do it when I first moved to Florida and the terminal spit out the betslip.
But I just like you wondered many times if the numbers I picked had any bearing on the QP numbers that ended up being printed on my ticket. And yes, you do "just gotta try new things".
Here's a "new thing" for you and I've no idea if this will work with FF5 or not: In New York you can hand a ticket that you played in the past to a clerk and say "Play it again." The clerk will then run your ticket through the terminal, and hand you an exact duplicate of it good for tonight's drawing. G5