It does though. Keeping runs down can be important for a lot of reasons. It's the reverse of the "high strike rate batting has intrinsic value".
A player like Sehwag is more valuable than his average alone suggests because of the affect it has on the game. Field placings, bowlers, his batting partner, morale etc. A low ER bowler has intrinsic value for the opposite reason. You can keep tighter fields, gives you more freedom from the other end, pressure on the batsmen. The list goes on.
"High SR is better because you need to take wickets" is overly simplified
You're right. Low ER does have intrinsic value. But I don't think that's valid in the context of the conversation. It has more value for bowlers 4, 5.
In the poll this thread is supposed to be discussing we're talking almost exclusively about bowler 1, maybe 2 (with the odd West Indian 3). In those circumstances, I think low SR is basically always preferable to low ER.
The elephant in the room is of course, spinners vs seamers. There's probably an implicit gripe in the minds of most who would want to reflexively "balance" spinner vs seamer value that low SR supremacy unfairly dings those spinners.
On the one hand, my reaction is "I don't care", because I want to evaluate the best bowlers, regardless of style, not hand out some pity points. But on the other hand I do think seam vs spin wrt low SR value merits a deeper look.
I don't think that great spinners are immune to this implication. In fact I think, the very best ones were aware of this and made a concerted effort to have an attacking approach to give more value to their team. It's apparent fron the names that ended up at the very top among spinners. Murali, Warne, O'Reilly have 3 of the lowest SRs for spin bowlers in history (Grimmet the other low SR spin bro).
But still even these names ended up with an SR usually a tad higher than those of the great seamers, and especially so the great strike specialists among them (i.e. Marshall, Donald, Waqar, Steyn). There's no doubt in my mind that seamers like this are the highest leverage players in the game.
But spinners have a way to mitigate this with a tool unavailable to most seamers, and that is through sheer volume. A candidate spinner (i.e. low average) or any candidate bowler for that matter, can make up for a higher SR, just by bowling more overs, and leveraging their value that way. Stats like WPM, match 7fer/10fer frequency, can give us a good indication of how successful they were in that.
Ultimately that's up to us to decide to what extent those spinners were successful in leveraging their value compared to a seamer, but the basic nature of the calculation remains the same.
Actually, what you'd ultimately want from an ideal "maximum value" bowler, (one with an adequately low average) would be low SR AND high volume. The big 5 seamers + Murali all show out as the pinnacle of that sort of statistical measure, in various mixes. And conversely it might show us which of those with "pretty averages" might be a bit fraudulent, through mixture of relatively high SR and/or low workload impact (*cough* *cough* Keith Miller).
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