Well, I'm from Europe actually, and my experience is that sometimes when you pick the smaller roads (less known cols) that the roads can be a hobbly and with little rocks on it (dangerous when descending). Went to Italy last year, the region around Firenze, and when we took the small roads it was just too dangerous, they were too narrow with almost impossible curves... A truck was on the hill when we were descending it, right after a curve, my friend had to brake full and fell of his bike next to the road.

Someone has told me that you can also have such roads in the mountains (on the less known cols), and since cyling is becoming more and more popular I thought there would be some people who already rode these cols, would be more fun to discover the bad roads in advance, would be too bad if we rode 40K to a col with a bad road