DHS Plastic Ball

Sure, you don't.  Explains why you feel a need to respond to them with arguments that use the reptilian part of your brain.  

What data shows disagreement?  I have played with every ball.  The Nittaku Premium plastic ball is an wierd animal.  There are some that break fairly quickly, and even when broken, are still fairly playable, sometimes with a cracked sound but sometimes without.  At Nationals, I do not remember breaking a ball, though I did break a couple in the first batch I bought from Japan.  It's pretty clear that some of the balls can be very durable, playing around 7 hours or more.  I still have a couple in my training set at least that old, though others have been broken.  But it's something that people know you can get a good batch or a bad batch with.  And no one questions the consistency or the playability, as the bounce is high and the predictability of the bounce is similar to celluloid.  I would have no problem with someone seriously asking at any time for a serious measurement of how long a NP40+ ball lasts as it is an open and serious question, though bad balls were known to exist (lots of complaints were made at the Euro Team Champs, for example, but not that many I remember at Nationals). For a DHS or Joola ball last year, that question was fairly ridiculous.  We broke the Joolas like eggs at both our club tournament and at the NA Teams.

> I don't get the reason for all this back and forth - why don't we all just ignore Hex?

Generally back and forth is how discussions work. Also despite it all, the appearance that claims are rational is desirable and this perception is lost when someone is poking holes in them.

And how is the aggregate expected difference from any one director different from the word on the street given the standards by which it was collected?  Did you query Wturber on his methodology?

You might think you are deceiving people, but the nature of your process is pretty transparent.

No, it's called a limited data set which might be biased even if measured accurately.  Wturber's data is larger, but has not be checked for anything that makes it clearly more rigorous than anything I have mentioned.  What I may do if our tournament director is in tomorrow is to ask him for numbers that contrast the balls we had in November vs. the balls in February.  What will be interesting is whether that result will met with another smart aleck remark or the same level of acceptance you displayed when you saw Wturber's stats.

Note that the Junior I asked bought 72 of these balls to practice for the NA teams tournament.  None of the balls survived that training period.  I bought 30, none of which survived either.  So word on the street or not, we aren't players who have just used a few of these balls.

We have rubber-covered concreted floors and can sometimes hit the concrete wall with hard shots on some of our main tables.  Maybe that explains the difference in breakage rate, though it doesn't explain why our seamless balls and Nittaku Premiums tend to do relatively well.