I agree with what you wrote about physical skills being so important but you are missing a big part about the importance of knowledge too and why someone with a lot of knowledge, even if they can't play well due to lack of talent, can still teach someone else with tons of talent who doesn't possess all their knowledge. The physics knowledge of the game (which is required in order to to play well) will mostly be learned by the subconscious through experience even if you aren't consciously aware of that knowledge and the physics. However, knowing the correct physics on a conscious level (and by that I mean consciously knowing exactly what will happen and why in all circumstances--not necessarily knowing all the complicated mathematical formulas) has plenty of benefits too. Among them are:
-Even though your subconscious will eventually learn most of the physics through experience, it will never learn quite all of it perfectly. You will still miss on occasion simply because your subconscious didn't know precisely what was going to happen on a shot. If you had the conscious knowledge of the physics behind that shot though, meaning you had the "book" knowledge of what was going to happen for lack of a better term, then your subconscious would have also developed and cataloged that knowledge too (and the subconscious knowledge is the working knowledge that is almost totally responsible for the judgments used in your shooting and playing). Having the conscious knowledge will eliminate those gaps in your subconscious knowledge therefore eliminating those errors caused by those knowledge gaps.
-For any given amount of talent (assuming the same amount of practice etc) the person with the most knowledge will be the better player. This also means that any particular player will be better with more knowledge even if nothing else improves such as their talent or amount of practice etc. Even Shane Van Boening would further improve with more knowledge, and there are plenty who have more knowledge than he does. Now granted those improvements would be incremental and very small at his level, since most ability is due to talent and hard work and since the subconscious learns most of the physics anyway with enough experience, but the improvements would still be there none the less.
-Even though most of the physics is learned through experience, it can be learned much faster if you have the conscious "book" knowledge of what happens on the table and why first. Your subconscious can catalog all your experience much faster and more efficiently when you already have the conscious knowledge. Having the conscious knowledge dramatically shortens the learning curve.
-Whenever what your conscious mind believes about something is in conflict with what your subconscious has learned through experience, this conflict in beliefs between the conscious and subconscious can lead to the occasional error that would not have happened without that conflict in beliefs. As already mentioned your subconscious has almost total control of making the judgments and decisions on your shot executions, but when your conscious believes something different about the physics than what your subconscious knows from experience it causes enough interference with your subconscious to cause it to make bad decisions on occasion. It causes the subconscious to second guess itself so to speak and to not totally do the right thing. If your conscious knowledge were always correct, it would never be in conflict with your subconscious knowledge and you won't be having those occasional errors caused by the conflict in belief between the two.
-Having the conscious knowledge of exactly what will happen and why on every shot at the table can lead to greater confidence, and we all know how importance confidence can be to our performance.
And as I said earlier, pool requires physical skill, and knowledge. As you point out, without physical skill all the knowledge in the world isn't going to make you great at pool, although it will certainly make you better than if you didn't have it. But similarly, all the physical skill in the world won't make you great without knowledge either. Fortunately our subconscious picks up most (but not all) of this knowledge through experience, but because of the reasons above we will be even better (and more quickly) by consciously learning more of the knowledge that is available. And it can be learned from the guys that have that knowledge, whether those guys have the physical skill to be able to perform well themselves or not.
