This is certainly a thoughtful and well-presented post, but I'd suggest that the level of play was raised more from 2015-25 than from 1980-2015, and advances in equipment has almost
nothing to do with it. The cues and tables were just as good ten years ago as today.
As you've rightly pointed out, the biggest change is how many more players there are. The globalization of the game over the past ten years has given rise to a Fargo Top 50 that includes at least one player from each of Iraq, Spain, Singapore, Albania, Poland, Vietnam, Bosnia, Hungary, Hong Kong, and Lithuania. Today's top players shoot at a much higher level than their counterparts of ten years ago.
When the IPT came along in 2006, all living hall of famers, many of whom still played at a very high level, were invited to the first full-field event, the IPT Las Vegas tournament. Mike Sigel predicted that the hall of famers, because of their high comfort level with the nappy cloth that was being used by the IPT, would thrive. This must go down as one of the worst predictions in the history of our sport, as the younger players easily adjusted to the conditions of yesteryear and not even one old-timer made a deep run. I am not buying any suggestion that this generation would have had any trouble with the old nappy conditions.
Just ten years ago, 4 1/2" pockets were the norm in top pro competition. The pockets are much tighter now because the standard of play has risen to a level most of us never imagined possible. One reason is that today's players have training resources available to them that were unavailable to the last generation.
Still, where you are undeniably right is in suggesting that one cannot fairly compare players across generations. Each player must be measured against his/her contemporaries. There is no way to fairly compare a Lassiter to a Mizerak to a Sigel to a Van Boening to a Filler. All we can say of each is that their performance against their contemporaries was phenomenal.
In short, we agree but we also disagree.
)))