Alan, you are one hard headed dude. Soften the blow? That's all it does? You seem to have no problem throwing $500 at video poker and if you lose it all walk away with a $500 loss, but you look forward to cashing out ahead using your stop win. But you look at freeplay like you might "get lucky" and get "some" of your money back. Red Alert! When you play off $500 in freeplay you might cashout more than $500. But the true value of a $500 loss rebate, played off on 9/6 Jacks is $497.72
$500 X 99.5439% = $497.72
Fab, 9/6 Jacks is a pretty good choice for running off the freeplay. I'm putting up a screenshot of the game stats to give you an idea of what you are looking at playing $2 denom. You can see that the HP/2P/3K represent about 70% of the payback. You will be playing just 50 hands so if you don't hit anything higher than this group of hands you will be looking at recouping about $350.
The next group of hands up the payscale are the ST/FL/FH. They represent about 21% of the payback. If you hit a few of those hands you will recoup somewhere above $450.
If you hit a quad or higher you will come up big on the play.