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You've got it right, the key to reliable reception is primarily, antenna selection and it's location.
A preamp will help when you are faced with a long run of coax, splitter loss and poor tuner noise figure.
Amplifiers do not improve the performance of the antenna.
Some preamps are designed to work well with a mix of weak and moderate strength signals. A few preamps are able to work well in the presence of fairly strong signals. The AP8275 is intended for use where no strong signals are present.
If you installed a higher gain antenna and aimed it at the Toledo stations, I would expect the AP8275 to have trouble. I would expect it to act as an RF mixer, generating sum and difference products of the various signals arriving at the input. The output would be a combination of the original signals plus many interfering signals produced inside the preamp, the by-products of overloading the amplifier.
A high gain antenna (8-bay panel or DXing Yagi) aimed at Fort Wayne equipped with a Winegard HDP-269 or Antennas Direct CPA-19 would be far less inclined to overload if it was turned toward Toledo.
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If the well is dry and you don't see rain on the horizon, you'll need to dig the hole deeper. (If the antenna can't get the job done, an amp won't fix it.)
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