I would say the population of AZ is fully qualified to make a good estimate of the relative difficulty. Your opinion is just that as is mine. For you aiming might be hard but for me I was pushing balls around a table when I was barely tall enough to see it. Maybe there's something to that, I don't know. In general it is my belief that educated pool players know that aiming isn't nearly as difficult as the stroke.
I understand your belief. Your belief is not fact. You don't know the facts on this and neither do I because we have not studied this in depth and it is highly unlikely that anyone in pool ever will. There are many beliefs about how things work that have been proven untrue over time. Aiming is not as easy for you as you think in my opinion but you are viewing it through your own experience and are happy with the results you get despite them not being the world class pinnacle of performance. The standard paradigm is that aiming is a byproduct of fundamentals but after all the time I have spent on this subject I don't agree. For me in order to know that aiming is "easy" or "hard" or better said what consistency level I have is to test it. Without that all I have is my own opinion of my aiming acuity without any hard data to back it up. I have no benchmark to base my knowledge on.
Let's take the "mother drill" espoused about by Randy. Imagine you taught someone to stroke perfectly. They could shoot a stop shot from any distance and stop dead every time. But they never practiced that drill or any cut shots. In other words they learned to aim center to center with incredible accuracy.
Then you take another person and teach them to stroke fairly decently but you teach them some aiming system, ghost ball or whatever until you are confident that they can actually get on the shot line consistently.
Which of these two players is likely to score better on the mother drill if neither of them have ever seen or tried it previously?
I completely agree that a person can achieve a decent level, even a pro level with serious brute force effort. Trial and Error hones skill in those who are dedicated to improvement. I just think that in the modern era we have better tools and techniques than just brute force table time.
I don't know how dedicated you have been to improving your skill level but you were fortunate to be able to have been able to play since you were a child. Were you as good as Mosconi was at 10 years old? If not why not? I submit that if you were not it is due to several factors in your life that were different than his life. If both of you started at 7 and both of you are 50 and he is a world champion and you are an above average league player then starting at 7 doesn't mean that you have all the pool knowledge and physical skill needed to beat champions. This is not a knock it is merely an illustration that one's own experience isn't the standard by which anything is judged by society or science.
If I were the only one saying that CTE is fantastic then absolutely decry me as a delusional fanatic. However there are others who also started at very young ages who think that CTE is fantastic and whom have a similar level of skill as you do at a similar age. All I am saying is that we can look deeper now into cause and effect than we ever could before and we should. And if we find through adequate testing that aiming is harder than thought and that some methods can indeed make it much easier to be consistently accurate then we should embrace and develop those methods.
