I wonder to what degree these differences in historical pro commentary and emphasis from amateur commentary and thinking are:
....
Probably very different for different things, and very different depending on the level of the amateur player? I honestly have no idea where the line is.
The two scenarios you describe are no doubt common, and certainly plausible here. But they are not the only ones possible, and I don't think they apply here, at least in quite the forms quoted.
I suspect the likeliest scenario is that people can see the sense or the potential of the alternative way of thinking being offered yet nevertheless hesitate to act on it. The reason may may mistrustfulness, stubbornness or some other -ness. But my experience is that whatever the -ness, there are certain things you just have to learn for yourselves. The original way of thinking is so embedded (both because it came first and because you've lived with it a long time). Divorce is a tough decision and it often seems easier to stay together "for the kids."
But there is also the fact that English go vocabulary grew in a weird and uncontrolled way. The first translators were either Japanese people who didn't speak English well, or English speakers who were very weak go players (typically members of the Occupation forces who discovered go in Japan). They also had virtually no knowledge of go history of the game in other lands. This actually applied to most Japanese go players, and it was with both shock and awe that they learnt about people like Huang Longshi from Go Seigen in the early 1950s when Kawabata published his "Conversations with Go Seigen." Go's claim that HLS was at least as good as Dosaku shocked some Japanese so much that they thought he must never be allowed to be the Honinbo. The old Japanese masters were puffed up to compensate, with the unfortunate side-effect that many people in the west ended up with an excessively blinkered and romanticised view of Japanese go history. Go players as noble samurai. That still applies today.
My main point there is that westerners also ended up with a Japlish vocabulary that does not mean quite what Japanese pros intend it to mean, and a language that is too skewered towards Japanese go thinking rather than Chinese (or Korean). They are thus working with the wrong tools for the job when they try to improve. But they are so used to these inferior tools that they refuse to adopt new ones.
I'll explain my thinking in a little more detail with an anecdote. Some years ago I became involved with shogi (Japanese chess). I was already a committed go player and did not specially want to play shogi, but I had made friends with George Hodges in London and he was moving heaven and earth to promote the game in the west. This included things like commissioning a specially made machine to print the shogi characters in diagrams (this was in pre-internet and pre-Unicode days). He published his own magazine but lacked material. That was where I came in. I translated material from the very kind Nihon Shogi Renmei and George and I enjoyed many trips to Japan to seek out historical material, which was my main interest. The NSR backed us in every way possible (e.g. putting us up within the NSR, arranging trips to equipment makers and shogi historians), as did individual top players. That made it very attractive for me to continue working on shogi even though I barely ever played it.
One of the first problems I faced was having to find English words for shogi terms. To some extent I could rely on existing go terms and western chess terms, but they were many new challenges. One problem was that many of the go or chess terms were actually false friends. The most notable was the word "centre." All the shogi players in the west were neophytes - DDK level. But they all knew chess. And they (and I) all knew that the central four-squares (or sixteen) on the 8x8 chessboard are the most important. All power and mobility radiates from there. So it was an easy leap to see the central 3x3 squares on the 9x9 shogi board as equally important. And we western players played accordingly. But as I was learning more and more about the Japanese view of shogi as I translated their texts, I became very uneasy. I noticed they never talked much about the centre. But they did talk about kurai, which I knew about from go. But I couldn't relate the go meaning to the shogi board. I was stuck.
Common sense would have told me to ask a shogi professional. I had easy access. But I was stubborn. I was a stick-in-the-mud. I couldn't believe that what I had learned (profitably) many years ago in chess could not possibly be different in shogi. But the weight of material in Japanese was such that the problem hammered away at me every day. One day the penny dropped. I can't remember the actual trigger, but I suddenly realised that the centre of the board in shogi is not the 3x3 area in the mid-point of the board but the whole of the central rank. I used to meet George almost every day and when I shared my discovery with him, we chewed it over and over and found that it explained sooooo many things that had puzzled us before (such as the high prevalence of pushing the edge pawns in shogi - usually a taboo in western chess).
Despite that, I was still mistrustful. "Western chess can't be wrong, can it?" was still floating around in my head. But on the next trip to Japan I asked a pro (a future Meijin) if the centre rank was indeed the main area of the shogi board. I never forget the look he gave me: it said "What idiot doesn't know that?" But when I told him that the central four squares on a chessboard were the main area, it was his turn to gape like an idiot. Buoyed up with the confidence of a pro's approval, both George and went from being kyu players to becoming dan players almost overnight - in my case without barely playing any games of shogi. The point was that the revelation didn't just explain away sticking points in the past, it changed our way of thinking. With that new way of thinking, I could suddenly see, for example, why the central 3x3 (or 5x5) didn't matter so much in shogi. It's because you have captured pieces you can drop anywhere. Your mobility comes from elsewhere, off the board, not from the 3x3 area.
I have come to realise something similar about the initiative in go by reading about it in old Chinese sources. I don't play go much so I have no idea whether it has made me a stronger player, but I certainly feel I understand much more about the game now, and that makes playing over games much more enjoyable (
despite AI!). It is my belief, based on my own experience, that if western go players would make the effort to ban sente and actually to use the word "initiative" (not to use "sente" and pretend to yourself that you understand it can cover the initiative"), they would be acquiring a better tool for the job (in the same way as realising sabaki means coping and not light and flexible shape!). Ways of thinking are often guided by words in our brain. Using a different word can change the way of thinking.
But, going back to shogi, another discovery I made then was that it is not enough to just tell people something. They have to discover it for themselves, probably slowly, as I did through daily translating and almost daily conversations with George. At around the same time, I happened to be in charge of a newsroom to which new technology was being introduced. Getting stick-in-the-mud journalists to adapt to new technology was, let's just say, a challenge ("there's no RETURN on my keyboard" - it was just ENTER). Most were Oxbridge people, so it wasn't a matter of intelligence. I was lucky that I had had my shogi experience and so guessed they just had to be allowed to work it though for themselves. But I can't claim I ever really understood the psychology behind it. After all, I have since gone through the same process on their side. My daughters get exasperated with me when I struggle with my iPhone or when I ask how to do something. The idea of "just Google it" doesn't come naturally to me.
So, I'm not expecting any quick transformations in the western amateur go scene. But I do think it is worth everyone making an effort to understand that our go words, and therefore our go ways of thinking, are based on a flawed vocabulary. How you deal with that is a matter of personal choice and motivation, but the tools won't get better by themselves.
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