Yes....wood needs to be aged......talk to a wood craftsman...today's technologies do not accelerate the process with the same results.
"When wood is used as a construction material, whether as a structural support in a building or in woodworking objects, it will absorb or desorb moisture until it is in equilibrium with its surroundings. Equilibration (usually drying) causes unequal shrinkage in the wood, and can cause damage to the wood if equilibration occurs too rapidly. The equilibration must be controlled to prevent damage to the wood. If dried too quickly, wood shrinks much at the surface, compressing its damp interior."
"Wood drying may be described as the art of ensuring that gross dimensional changes through shrinkage are confined to the drying process. Ideally, wood is dried to that equilibrium moisture content as will later (in service) be attained by the wood. Thus, further dimensional change will be kept to a minimum.
It is probably impossible to completely eliminate dimensional change in wood, but elimination of change in size may be approximated by chemical modification. For example, wood can be treated with chemicals to replace the hydroxyl groups with other hydrophobic functional groups of modifying agents (Stamm, 1964). "
"Among all the existing processes, wood modification with acetic anhydride has been noted for the high anti-shrink or anti-swell efficiency (ASE) attainable without damage to wood. However, acetylation of wood has been slow to be commercialized due to the cost, corrosion and the entrapment of the acetic acid in wood. There is an extensive volume of literature relating to the chemical modification of wood (Rowell, 1983, 1991; Kumar, 1994; Haque, 1997)."
"Drying timber is one method of adding value to sawn products from the primary wood processing industries. According to the Australian Forest and Wood Products Research and Development Corporation..........green sawn hardwood, which is sold at about $350 per cubic metre or less increases in value to $2,000 per cubic metre or more with drying and processing."So yes, properly aged and stored wood used for pool cues is definitely stronger, more desirable and is very expensive which is why production cues aren't made with the same wood that custom cue-makers use.........it's too costly to outright purchase wood already aged for7-8-10 years and longer and there's too many issues associated with environmental control and storage of wood inventories for pool cues/shafts etc. to do that on their own.
I am not saying that production cues are manufactured using inferior wood and to infer anything like that would be complete misinterpretation by the reader. What I am saying is that the wood used by higher end custom cue-makers is superior quality wood. Very simply put, that means it's more expensive wood no matter how you slice it but wood factor is not the sole difference as there's so many other considerations as well.