I think it's a myth in the industry for some reason or another but you are correct that pass count doesn't affect ink saturation. If you are printing 720 x 720 4 pass, it prints 180 dots per pass to eventually add up to 720 so there are always 720 dots printed no matter how many passes. The reason this helps when you are over saturating prints is because it gives each pass enough time to cure before the next layer is printed so it doesn't pool up and have a hard time drying.
This is also why you can't have a 720 x 1080 profile print in 4 pass and the lowest pass count you can print is 6 because each channel has 180 nozzles. So if you divide 1080 by 4 you get 270 which is more nozzles than the head has to fire but if you divide by 6, you get 180. It's also the reason 360 x 360 resolutions can only be 2 pass.
And that's correct. I won't argue with that. I used to think the same way too. But in reality, when I tried to eliminate the over-saturation by increasing the number of passes, the result was the opposite.
The second thought would be..the color profiles I'm using are not good, even if there are made for that type of media. And that is also true in theory. In reality, it's not that simple. There are many factors involved.
The explanation is that you increase the number of passes when you want to increase the resolution or ink coverage and thus the quality. In case of ink coverage, you have more ink.
What is higher resolution? More dots/inch. More dots/inch means that the distance between the dots...decreased (the dots are closer to each other).
That drop of ink won't stay there, it will spread (unless we are printing with gel). We all know that liquids have the tendency to spread, even at high viscosity and on a perfect leveled surface. If you decrease the distance between two drops of liquid the probability they will combine is higher and create a pool faster. Ink pool you don't want...colors start to mix and that's over-saturation.
See the resin label doming technique.. they put few drops of resin with a distance between them and let them spread till they became a single uniform surface. If you put the drops closer to each other, they will became one faster. What happens afterwards is important too. If the surface is not perfectly leveled, the resin will tend to travel in the direction of the slope, leaving less resin on one side and more on the other side.
That's why we don't have ink uniformity on the prints when having over-saturation, and we see it more pronounced on larger areas. The substrate is never perefectly leveled, due to many factors: humidity, temperature (causing the material to stretch, become wavy, curl), printer not leveled, etc.... and the ink will tend to travel and settle uneven.
We say...that's why we have color profiles, to control the amount of ink. But when we do color profiling, we do it on small squares where the probability of the substrate to be uneven is less and with an amount of ink limited to that little square. In that little square the ink won't spread so quickly because we have less forces to break capilarity and the surface tension. But if the surface of the print is larger, the amount of ink is bigger (per overall), it will create a pool faster and the forces that drive the ink to migrate are..stronger, so the pool travels..faster. Don't imagine that the ink drops cure instantly. It doesn't happen even on UV printers (due to the fact that UV lamp's efficency is not 100% and other factors involved).
Also, printing media can have different properties (absobtion rate, porosity), even from the same lot...sometimes even in the same roll. The actual fabrication technology cannot assure a continuous perfect constant quality. Actually, this is why you see people having different results for the same brand of media, same printer, same ink and same color profile. You'll see even the same person saying that one brand is better and after a while being dissapointed. Of course, this is just one of the multiple causes. The ink is subjected to this inconsistency in manufacturing too. Also temperature variation in eletronics and printheads can have an impact in print quality.
As a conclusion: ink over-saturation is controlled by the color profiles, but the higher the resolution is, the less forgiving to the media, ink quality and color profile will be and more temperature dependent...and the probability of forming an ink pool is higher.
I'm sure this could have been explained much better in less words, but unfortunately my native language is not english.
I'm also opened to critics and counterarguments. I'm sure we'll all benefit from it