I would like to do a 'what if' thought exercise
To start: I personally have only played this game in the reactive resin era. And even then, I did leagues for a lot of years more as a 'something to do in the wintertime' than a hobby I pursued deeply in to, only getting serious enough to understand the physics of the game and what details of the equipment matters, and so on.
As a single metric, simply the number of 300 games recorded by ABC and then USBC by year is an obvious indicator that the game has gotten easier. Or at least the potential in the game to score higher has increased and bowlers have been able to leverage that, hence the many-fold increase in honor scores.
The 'what if' I am pondering is: what if reactive balls were not allowed. Maybe even what if urethane balls were not allowed, and the game was still polyester balls?
Because I think that while the balls' capabilities are a significant portion of raising the ceiling on potential scoring, I suspect that the trend would still be a sharp increase.
And I suspect this by looking at, well, simply, every other sport. Specifically, that the last decade or two of every sport has also seen significant changes.
Basketball: the 3-point line was in the ABA and then NBA adopted it after the merger for the 1979-1980 season. But it still took until Steph Curry in the 2010s to show everyone that it was possible for players to have a good enough make% to build an offense around a 3-pt shot instead of a 2-pt shot. The specs of basketball haven't changes -- ball and hoop and court still same dimensions, but that game has had major changes.
Baseball: pitchers today are expected to throw at velocities and speeds that were true outliers for most of the game's history, the pursuit of the strikeout as the superior out because any runners on at the time of making that out have minimal chances to move up or score on the play. Meanwhile, sabermetrics turned in to Moneyball turned in to the extensive analytics departments every MLB team has on staff. The value of batter hitting extra base hits over the value of just hitting singles is weighed heavily and striking out 100+ times a season so long as you can mash enough HRs directly leads to Kyle Schwarber types today being rather common. Single biggest thing is that pitchers have gotten so good that almost every hitter is a guess hitter today and they look just for a pitch of a specific speed coming in an let anything else go bye -- so many looking strikeouts for fastballs right down the middle of the plate. Wade Boggs' superior skill of fouling off pitches and working at bats has all but disappeared. But the game's dimensions are still he same: 60' 6" from the plate to home, 90' basepaths, and so on. Technically, I should mention that the ball construction does drift a little as there are some years the balls fly a little better than others and the bases are slightly larger with the rules change a few years back so very slightly less distance between bases now, but big picture, the equipment has remained pretty static, despite it not being the same game at all as it was 2 decades ago.
I am not going to make this post a million lines long by looking at all the sports, lol, but I think that while equipment improvements in sports clearly can influence the game, I don't think we can overlook the influence of better analysis of the game, more easier spreading of the results of those analyses, and better teaching of how to do things that actually affect game outcomes.
Therefore, I contend that even in a 'what if' scenario where balls had far, far less hook technology directly built in to them that given how the lane oil machines today are more consistent, given how the lane surfaces themselves are more consistent, and given that bowling would also have followed every other sport out there and data gathered, training updated, etc., that the current state of the game would not really be massively different than it is today. Less oil on the lanes, for sure, less need for super-large arsenals of balls, too. But I think the bowlers that are super consistent with a reactive ball would still be super consistent with a polyester ball. And that they would learn the techniques with that different equipment that would still given them maximal strike chances. And that us regular bowlers who are still doing leagues today would learn from that, too.
If lane conditions call for it, the best can still score with polyester balls -- see several of the US Masters rounds this year, right? I don't know if I can untangle what % of the potential for higher scores in bowling would be the ball tech versus better understanding of the game and training, but that is some of why I wanted to start this thread. I am really curious of others' thoughts here. I am not curious for too many vents about USBC and two-handers and etc.
I will close this opening text with my personal experience. And that is that I was a 160s-170s average bowler when I was doing it mostly as a social event. And it is primarily through a better understanding of the game that I can carry 2-teens averages today. I can do my own personal estimation of what has made me a 50-pin better bowler today, and I would say 35 to 40 pins of that is just simply better understanding of the game, the phases of ball motion on the lane, what to observe, experimenting about what adjustments I can and cannot reliably make, etc. the last 10 to 15 pins would be equipment. Specifically, having equipment that I know is better turned to my specific shot, the shots I am comfortable making, having equipment that I lug around with me to handle lane transition and changes to the shot that I am not very consistent at via just manipulating the shot. So I am like a 75% improved from better knowledge and better execution of my game and 25% improved from better equipment. If you took a retrospective of your game, what do you think your %s would be?