Intriguing. On what research do you base your assessment of burls being softer? A rubber band is plenty strong, and obviously not a bit hard. So are hardness & strength really relative at all?
Take a resin stabilized buckeye burl and core it with bubinga. How might that cue hit? Now take a straight grain zebrawood & core it with maple. Will it hit as hard as the buckeye burl? So let's say you are a player that has both of these cues. Which cue would you tell people hit the hardest?
Straight grain rosewoods are easy. Any idiot can build an ok playing cue with straight grain cocobolo & straight maple, given that he at least knows how to open a bottle of glue. Does that make him an accomplished cue maker? Does that give him the credentials required to build a cue with burl, and it still hit that good? And when he tries it and fails, does it automatically mean that burls are not good for cues? Or can it be as simple as him not having the skills nor knowledge to pull it off? Is it the burl's fault for being an inferior material, or the builder's fault for being an inferior cue maker?
And don't forget about that soft woven fabric we all use every time we build a cue, in the way of melamine & phenolic. Or the powders that get melded into solid plastic rods & tubes. Even paper, as useless as it is for cues, makes the revered micarta that builders and players alike can't get enough of. Why is burl any different? It's an inanimate material that can be manipulated/altered into a material that is perfectly suited for cues. Burls don't make a cue play bad. Cue makers make a cue play bad. Good cue makers make a burl cue play good. Bad cue makers don't. Burl is nothing but another material. It's the builder who knows how to utilize it, or not.
