OP, I was you as a young sprout (just out of college) about 25 years ago. I had had OTTBs…tired of buying other people’s broken horses/mistakes, not a lot of money so I couldn’t write a check for a great 3-year-old, but I could pay that over time by breeding one for myself, knew a lot what I wanted in terms of a good mind and something about what I wanted in good conformation.
I bred a nice KWPN (Dutch WB) for myself using an American TB mare I owned and liked. FWIW, I had a great time, learned a lot, was very satisfied with the whole experience of making a horse for myself, my way from the beginning. And it cost so much time and money that I wouldn’t do it again.
If breeding/raising isn’t a really compelling project for you, I’ll suggest that the math says two things:
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Buy a horse already on the ground, preferably closer to being started under saddle.
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Buy the individual animal and, if you can, meet both parents.
This gets to your question:
WBs are indeed registries, not breeds. That means their studbooks are relatively open, not at all like the JC’s book for TBs. And what that means is that in picking a given registry-- say KWPN or Holsteiner or whatever, is that you are largely picking the selection criteria/breeding purpose that the arbiters of that breed hand in mind. And, to some extent, you are picking some dominant stallion lines. I’d say, too, you are picking a breeding strategy that admits more or less TB blood… at least that’s a feature of any registry/breeding program that will be of interest to you.
All this means that it can be a very long, complicated and deep research project to get to know these registries (and the lines within them) well enough to pick a given horse according to it’s pedigree. I wouldn’t try to do it. Instead, I would teach myself something about stallion lines** that have what I want, focusing particularly on those horses’ reputation for kindness, intelligence and tractability. And I would look for individual horses and pedigrees that had some TB blood up close. But I’d mainly be very critical in my evaluation of both parents: What had they done?** Who handled and rode them? In short, registry and way-back ancestry aside, was I buying “DNA that had done the job I’ll want my horse to do?”
** These asterisks are about the difficulty and necessity of evaluating the mare’s contribution. I think it’s an understandable and large mistake to leave the mare’s side of things so random. So in the best of all possible worlds, I’d be able to pick a stallion who stamped his babies and a mare (who most likely won’t have a maternal lineage that’s selected the same way), who had done things in her life and whose type meshed well with that of the stallion. For reasons of nature and nurture, it’s a really bad idea to ignore the quality of the mare’s mind. JMHO.
With respect to picking registries and, in effect, the history of their selection criteria, my story won’t apply now, but might help. I picked a KWPN stallion in part because, while the Dutch book was then open to TB mares, their keuring system was rigorous and conservative. Others (somewhat rightly) then complained that Dutch WBs were the most old skool, cart-horse like of the WBs around North America back then. But I didn’t want something like what the American WB Society has going on: A stud book for any cross that wants a certificate of pedigree.
So my OTTB mare was evaluated by a Dutch jury who came to the US with a translator; there was no NA-KWPN and no Americans trying to convince Dutch breeders that anyone should try to breed a horse for the American amateur hunter rider (Even though I was one of these and wanted one of these, I didn’t/don’t agree with breeding for that purpose.) I was prepared to scrap my plans if the Dutch jury told me my mare was a POS. That’s the nature of selective breeding and preserving the quality of a registry: You don’t get to breed whatever you want; you turn over that decision to someone who has much more experience evaluating animals.
And then her colt started in an Auxiliary Studbook. He would only get admitted to the Main Book (and branded) if he passed his own inspection as a three-year-old. I really liked the Dutch insistence of evaluating the phenotype of a relatively mature horse who brought in the rather “uncontrolled” or “unknown genetics” of a TB. It makes sense to me that there should be another “gate” to pass through (beyond blood/ancestry) for this kind of out-cross horse to get through before he’s accepted into the registry in a complete way and allowed to represent the type that “counts” as a KWPN.
If nothing else, IMO, you want to look for a registry that has a breeding vision and is focused on that or conservative and tough in its admission/selection criteria.
Please note that this is not something that is going to be in the near future. I love researching and learning new things and just want to get a better grasp of the Warmblood breeds and bloodlines.
