Take the earlier LAX flight, there's lots of great food in Seattle anyways and it's a pretty easy airport to get some work done at. I've had no problem killing 5 hours during layovers there.

On the other hand, in May I made 2 connections of 40 minutes each on paper. The first inbound plane didn't get a gate for 20 minutes and I was sweating before they offloaded us. The other one arrived at the gate 30 minutes early and I had time to grab Beecher's before my connecting flight.

It's all gonna be a roll of the dice... I do short connections only when there's a later same-day flight, and I usually never mess with short connections to the last flight of the day. Don't want to be stuck somewhere overnight!