Actually it was the Texas Express tour that brought in the 41" rule.
Your answers:
Jumping too easy, no. There is no instance when jumping is too easy because it is still a shooter using an inert object to make the ball move.
Well that's like your opinion, man, but I have to disagree. Like I've said I can teach about anyone of moderate skill how to easily jump balls and make clean hits on an object ball in probably ten or fifteen minutes. It takes longer to get them to learn how to make an effective bridge ffs.
The reason jump cues were regulated is because some of the early ones were damaging to the other equipment and that is against the rules.
Um sorry but that's not true. Damage to the equipment may have been
one of the arguments for the 40" rule, but the primary point was always that the super short cues took too much of the skill out of the shot.
Besides, someone who wants to seriously say that a 40" jump cue does less 'damage' to the balls, cloth, or table than a 16" jump cue is pretty much nuts. That doesn't pass the smell test at all.
2. Are we at that point? No. For nearly 20 years jump cues in the current form have been a part of pool worldwide and it is only here in America where people debate it. The rest of the world which has the bulk of better players has accepted them as part of the sport and mastered their use to round out their skills. Only in America do some people cling to some outdated notion that pool would better if it were like in the 40s,50s,60s,70s,80s etc....
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-N900A using Tapatalk
Sorry but this is false as well. For sure lots of top players in the international community are good with jump cues and they are in use in lots of tournaments, but it's hardly an issue that isn't debated. Hell the Brits banned jumping altogether from snooker in like 1959 (and that game isn't exactly struggling). In fact two international players in Appleton and Shaw are pretty clearly anti-jump cue, because I just saw them write about it on Facebook. Immonen too, I believe.
As for the whole 20 years thing, or whatever the actual timing is, longevity really has no bearing on the discussion. Lots of things have been in various sports for a long time and then been regulated out. Anchored putting and square grooves in golf were around for far longer than jump cues, but now both have been banned (or will be in 2016). There are countless examples in other sports too, including aluminum bats vs. wood, polyester vs. natural gut strings for tennis rackets, heated blades for ice skates, 'tacky' gloves in the NFL, active suspensions in Formula One, the list goes on and on. Debates about whether a new technology makes a sport better or worse go on all the time, and there are some pretty clear winners and losers for them all, and a lot of nuance in the decisions involved.
When it comes to pool I guess what's needed is some kind of metric whereby the 'ease of use' of something like jump cues needs to be measured by some kind of criteria that are beyond just the opinion of people who may or may not have a vested interest in the result. As for what that might be that's probably a whole other discussion, but I for one would submit that the ease of teaching the skill to someone is a big part of it, and it's pretty hard to argue that it doesn't take longer to kick -- and especially to kick
effectively-- than it does to learn how to jump. I also think the difficulty rating for getting a good result out of a random snooker is a lower with jumping over kicking the
vast majority of the time. Again it's just like my opinion, but together those are two things that put me pretty squarely against the jumpers.
