Thank you Jon, especially to the short-cut to handicap checking and changing. Of course, one still needs to revisit original race-by-race data to validate. It sounds like creating a season-long one-design series and manually transferring race results would be the lower-risk approach for non-expert users.
My second question was unanswered, but perhaps implied: if we were to use the season series as the basis file and ‘save-as’ to race or monthly series results we would still undo variable handicaps, and would have to change the discard profile to boot. Correct?
There is no free lunch. 
Warren Nethercote
St Margaret Sailing Club