I read this whole thread and I am just going to contribute that, when I was a competitor on the european level in e-sports (counter-strike), we all agreed that acceleration of the mouse movement should be turned off. At that time, windows had its own acceleration that needed to be turned off, and we even had scripts that would disable windows ability to impart acceleration to the mouse movement by code. This was before e-sports became more mainstream and this culture is what pushed mousepads to become bigger and bigger. Nowadays you see everyone playing on big cloth mousepads that cover the whole desk.
Why? Because it gives you more gears -- you are able to impart a larger range of speeds. No matter how good touch you have on the ball, the touch on the ball is ultimately increased when you remove a "third party" speed modifier. As an outsider to high level table tennis, I can say that bouncy rubbers seem to be a trick to make the consumer think it is helping them be more consistent in their performance, but it removes nuance and skill. I am aware that this nuance is removed in the current metagame anyway, where attacking at the first opportunity is alfa and omega, but it does not take away from this first principle of having a larger range of speeds to play with.