This is a joke, right?
Of course the equipment plays a huge factor on the difficulty.
How many players with a snooker background have come on to the pool scene and done really well?
Now compare that to the number of pool players that have gone over to snooker and done really well.
It's not even close.
(warning, tl;dr)
It's not a joke at all. It's illogical and makes zero sense to reduce the learning curve and difficulty of a sport or game down to the equipment alone. It's much, much more difficult to hit a baseball than it is to hit a cricket ball, even factoring in that cricket balls are "bowled" on a bounce.
Does this make baseball the intrinsically harder sport? No. Because the sports have different rule sets and offensive and defensive standards. A home run is a big offensive event in baseball because of how hard it is to hit the ball, while a "home run" (a six) in cricket isn't really all that impressive on its own (not to mention cricket boundaries are much smaller, around 225-300 feet). In cricket, good players are expected to hit enough good balls to get a score of around 40-50 runs.
Similarly, snooker and pool have different offensive and defensive standards. First of all, comparing the rotation games to snooker makes little sense, since the rule sets are so different. Closest pool analog is straight pool. Snooker's greatest offensive accomplishment is a 147, requiring 36 made balls in a row. A run of 36 in straight is something a decent B player could do.
When people compare the "difficulty" of each game, all they are focusing on is how hard it is to pocket a ball in a vacuum, which is rather dumb, because it isn't a 1 to 1 comparison given the two game's different standards.
The "transition" argument is another bad one. It's correlation without causation. To arrive at a definitive answer of which game it's easier to transition to and vice versa, we'd have to know how many serious pool players attempted snooker vs. how many serious snooker players attempted pool, their level of commitment, and prior experience with either game.
Furthermore, it's a lot easier to find an American pool table in the UK/Europe than it is to find a snooker table in the US, so all these snooker players who "successfully" transitioned probably had more experience with pool than a North American counterpart who tried snooker (and to my knowledge, only 4 notable players tried, Rempe, Miz, Alex, and Corey, all past their physical primes at the point when they took their flyer). And the snooker players tried their hands at short race 8 ball and 9 ball, which have a lot more variance than a 5 frame snooker match.
The transition argument also depends on what games we're comparing. If you polled the site on what they feel is the most difficult cue sport, 3 cushion would lead by a significant margin. And given a pool player's more extensive experience with using extreme English, power strokes, and relative ball size, a pool player would excel in 3 cushion more than a snooker player. So is pool now the harder game because the pool player takes to the hardest cue sport on Earth quicker than a snooker player?
People all too often blindly fetishize snooker because of the table length and pocket size, but forget that pocketing a ball in snooker (or playing defense) doesn't mean the same thing as it does in pool. Making 6 balls in a row in snooker for a run in the 20s is pretty good. Making 6 balls in a row in straight pool is nothing. 26-30 balls in a row in snooker for a century is outstanding, an offensive event the greatest players achieve only about 8% of the time. 26-30 balls in a row is basically expected for a professional player in straight pool if he starts with a shot.
Boiled down, you can't sum up the transition argument until first controlling for a shit-load of variables, i.e. game type, talent pool depth, level of commitment, prior experience. My instinctive guess would be that snooker players have transitioned with moderate success because more of them tried. Unless you're a top 5 player in the world in pool, you're probably working a side job. Not much incentive, nor does it make sense, for a middling pro to drop his career and family life to pursue snooker in the UK, where best case scenario for him is probably low-tier pro, which doesn't pay well. Nor does it make sense for Shane to drop his lucrative pool career to go chase mid-tier pro snooker money.
