You completely missed the point, and sorry to say, but your analogy is poor.
The NBA doesn't play on 10' rims because high school basketball teams do. High school basketball teams play on 10' rims to prepare those good enough for college and/or the NBA.
I think we perhaps agree more than disagree. The main point is that high-school and professional basketball is played on the same equipment, and that is desirable for pool as well.
What makes the difficulty of the equipment not matter so much in basketball and soccer is that the quality of the defense rises with the quality of the offense.
This distinguishes those games from golf or bowling, which are offense-only activities.
Perhaps if this country had a league that actually allowed people to progress to a professional tour (also non-existent), then those leagues would be playing on the big tables. With the amount of great players across the globe, having them play on a small table with buckets does absolutely no good for the sport.
Again, we agree it is desirable for the leagues and the pros to play on the same equipment. I like 9' tables, and major events in much of the rest of the world use them. For these reasons events on 9' tables are good. But 7' tables are so much more practical. You can fit more in a given space. You can cart them around more easily. There can be more opportunity for leagues and tournaments.
For this reason I prefer to see us legitimize both 7' and 9' tables. I think that's a smart decision for pool.
Pool as we frequently play it is kind of a mixture of an offense-only activity and an offense/defense mixture. And that is why we keep wanting to tighten the pockets and lengthen the table. We are treating it like an offense-only activity. We think we have to narrow the fairways and thicken the rough and put in more water hazards.
But we don't. That's not the right direction. It is fine to play on 7' tables. But I think we need to modify the games slightly to make it more like basketball, or more like baseball where better batters are offset by better pitchers, or football where better receivers are offset by better defenders, and so forth.
How can we do that for rotation games and 8-ball games on a 7' table? How can we make the games fun to watch and not too easy?
Like this:
Rotation games
Mandatory roll out after the break.
8-Ball
The player at the table after the break may choose to SHOOT or to NOT SHOOT. If he chooses to SHOOT, his opponent tells him whether he's stripes or solids. If he chooses to NOT SHOOT, he assigns striped or solids to his opponent.
All rotation games on all tables should be played with a mandatory roll out. This will lead to INTERESTING games even for top pros playing 9-ball on a 7' table. This would not, as some people think, lead to automatic safety games because nobody is going to roll out to someplace his opponent can play a lockup safety. The first player is going to roll out to a hard offensive shot or a hard safety--maybe tying up a ball along the way. This roll out strategy would be a far more nuanced and interesting skill that the stupid break shot. And it would make EVERY game have drama, even on a 7' table.
