Quote Originally Posted by Catullus64 View Post
Now here's something where I can bring real experience to bear, as someone with many hours' experience missing targets with bows and failing to control horses. I never figured that shooting from horseback was, itself, a distinctly difficult skill. Archery is hard, especially archery with high-poundage war bows. Horsemanship is hard, especially if you're using very skittish early modern horses, and are trying to ride them in the stressful events of battle. Horse archery doesn't need to be any harder than Horsemanship + Archery to be an incredibly demanding amount of training that needs to be invested in one warrior.
Compared to what? The guy with a spear that had 30 minutes of instructions, sure. Compared to a samurai, knight, Landsknecht, charioteer or any other soldierly caste? Not really, especially not if they use horse as well, since horse training can be the real bottleneck. Samurai are actually an interesting case, since they trained as heavy cavalry, heavy infantry and horse archers before the Sengoku Jidai.

This exact argument of "it requires a ton of training and then you are a supersoldier for the time period" has been used time and again for: knightly shock cavalry, English warbows, double-bladed viking swords, bolt-action rifles and many, many more. The only weapon where I've seen it hold moderately true is the sling, which requires stupidly huge amounts of training and then enables you to slightly outmach bows under 150 lbs draw weight.