hi @Carl,
i have to disagree on the shoe size analogy.
As someone new to TT, I totally get that you don't understand.
But TT has something that causes it to be different than a lot of other sports.
Like, say I was just starting to bike. As a beginner biker but with a lot of money, if I bought a 10,000 top of the line bike, it would not make me get better at biking more slowly.
With running, getting something that was not exactly the right shoe for me, but fit correctly would not significantly hinder the mechanics of my stride....I would not take three strides in running and bounce to the side and hit a pole. Which, actually is sort of what happens when you swing too hard, have a very slight flaw in contact and the ball goes 4 feet too high above the table or hits into the net.
So, the thing that is going on with table tennis is, there is this level of precision that is not the case with most sports. Like, in baseball, baseball enthusiasts are fond of saying that the single hardest thing to do in sports is to make the bat make contact with the ball. But baseball players all pretty much use one thing. If the bat is the right length for the player, there is not much variation after that.
With table tennis, you are taking a small ball and trying to make contact with that small ball with a somewhat small racket that has a certain kind of rubbers on it. The rubbers also can be varied.
Now, you are not just trying to bang the racket into the ball. You are trying to contact a small slice of the edge of the ball, say, 1-2mm of the ball so that the ball is grabbed by the topsheet and sinks some of the way into the sponge but does not hit the wood. For most people at your level, it takes eons to not bang into the ball and hit the wood. BUT NOT FOR ALL. And I think that might be the exception to the rule that Zyu was talking about.
I have seen some kids, and a couple of a adults who just, somehow, intuitively got how to contact the edge of the ball to get massive spin even though they really did not know how to play TT. That person can start with a totally different blade than most. And most kids under 15 can start with faster equipment than an adult learner should.
And then there is the emotional side of things.
Now, for instance, as you have wrote more and more, I have gotten a better sense of what you need from the pure standpoint of learning the sport. However, I have also got that from the emotional side of things, if I told you to get something as slow as you actually need, you would try it, say to yourself, "this blade is way to slow for me, Carl doesn't know what he is talking about," and go back to something way way too fast for you.
That blade would most likely be the Appelgren Allplay which I slipped into my simple generic list. However, I told you you could get the Korbel because it was fast enough that you might stick with it even though it is still likely way too fast for you based on a lot of what you have said in this thread.
Still, I don't know for sure that my assumptions based on what you have written are the result of you overestimating, underestimating or accurately representing your abilities. And one thing I have learned is this. Having had hundreds of players who did not want to show the whole forum footage of them playing send me PMs with their play while asking for suggestions, I have still never seen one player whose video footage even remotely matched the image they presented of their play. Sometimes I will overestimate a person's level based on certain things they say. Sometimes the opposite. But the picture presented and the things I see in footage never line up.
Without the footage, I really can't tell. But the list of blades I gave actually covers quite a large range.
And aside from the Appelgren Allplay, another blade that would actually probably be right for the physical side of things would be a Stiga Allround Classic. However, I am pretty confident you would walk away thinking either of those was way too slow for you and not understand at all why they would be good for you.
So, all of the other blades on that list would probably be too fast for you and the fastest of them is the Korbel. But the Korbel would still be better than the PG7 and the certainly better than spending money on an Inner Carbon blade.
But, in the end, you can go on thinking what you think. If you play for long enough, you may start understanding the sport better. There are things that, when you cannot do them, in TT, seem to be invisible because of how much the sport has to do with the precision of how you contact that thin slice of the ball, and not just that thin slice of the ball, but, on one shot you contact a thin slice of the top of the ball, on another you contact a thin slice of the side of the ball, side/top, side/bottom, bottom, and when you are contacting the side of the ball, will you need to contact the outside, the inside (for a righty, on FH, the outside would be the far right side, the inside would be the left side which is closer to you; with BH you would switch that, contacting the left side would be the outside [for a righty] contacting the right side would be the inside; the results are hook or fade sidespin and they are needed for responses to hook or fade sidespins). And I have not even mentioned tracking the arc, curve and kick of the ball hit by your opponent.
So, even what I explained above is a such a large oversimplification of something that causes you to require an extreme amount of control and precision with how you track and intercept the ball and what part of the ball you contact and how precise that contact is. Just think of a left handed player looping hook-loops at you and the ball is curving 3 feet towards your backhand side and when the ball bounces the side/top kick of the ball is massive so the ball accelerates to twice the speed it was going before the bounce. You have to read the curve and arc of the ball as your opponent is contacting it and move to the right position for your shot. And then after the kick, you have to contact precisely, and because a lefty hook is curving towards your BH side, you have to contact the outside of the ball to control his sidespin so that your FH loop goes where you want it to. If you have ever swung and thought the ball was one place and just missed or mishit the ball because it was not where you thought, those things happen because you are not reading all those details. And having just the right equipment will actually help you get better at reading that stuff because you won't be hampered by having to adjust to a piece of equipment that is too fast for you.
So, I don't think there are the same kinds of variables in running that would require such drastically different equipment for people who are struggling with different aspects of running as there are with TT. And I would not have to look at how a person running reads where the ground is and how he contacts the ground.
But, since you are playing for a year, if you keep playing for another few decades, you might understand why, what I see on the forum is so many people giving terrible equipment advice because they just tell people to buy a blade without knowing anything about how the person plays. You have the right to play with equipment that does not work for you and figure these things out (or not) the way so many others have in the past.
All I will say is, good luck and happy holidays.