The point about string gauges came up earlier in this thread, and for me, seeing the analogy between heavy gauge strings and heavy golf clubs was a HUGE lightbulb moment. I knew the inherent truth through music, and somehow missed it with golf. I’m a musician by profession, specifically a bassist. I came up playing the upright bass, which is like the music equivalent of a persimmon club. It does you NO favors, unwieldy, unforgiving, if you have faulty technique there’s nowhere to hide. If you get good with one of THOSE though, switching to electric is cake. On the other hand, electric players switching to upright universally have big problems. Now these days I play electric for gigs, due to stylistic reasons, but I play it very much with an acoustic bass sensibility. That means I’m focused on tone-production, doing everything possible to get the fattest sound from the instrument itself, before any amplification. And for more raw signal that means heavy gauge strings, which by nature need to be strung to a higher tension (stiffer). I also use flat-wound strings, which have a thuddier tone and tend to require even a little more tension then their easier to play round-wound counterparts. Heavy, stiff, flat… any of this sounding familiar? 
The point behind it all is to give MORE resistance. The harder it is to play, the more I have to do to make dynamic changes (big gear/small gear). This means I need stronger hands than someone playing on a lower resistance set up, but I will have a MUCH bigger dynamic range at my disposal, and much better volume control. As a side bonus, I also get increased accuracy, coming from the string not moving as much due to the tension.
I rarely teach anymore because of my touring schedule, but I am very emphatic with every student (and anyone who asks about my sound) to set their gear up to maximize resistance and make the hands do the work. Not only that, but we want the hands to be very strong, strong enough to able to all that work using less of their total potential, giving us even more range. We like ‘head-room’ in the hands. We normally talk about head-room in referring to amps, for example, it’s better to play on a 1000 watt amp turned down than a 300 watt amp cranked up. Well, I’ve got ‘1000 watt hands’ and if I try to play someone else’s instrument that’s set up to be easy to play, I’ll just overpower it waaaay too easy. I can only use 0-2 of my range of attack, as opposed to 0-10. The amount of potential ‘feel’ (that range) is directly proportional to the amount of resistance offered me by the instrument. RESISTANCE=FEEL.
This is like the tip of the iceberg, I could write a book. I haven’t even started on action (string height) or options for where to pluck the string and the +s/-s of those choices, or how these things interrelate with all the previously discussed factors… It gets deep. But the bottom line is that here at ABS I’ve been shown that this whole phenomenon is at the heart of properly striking a golf ball. FEEL is something to be sought after, it’s what makes one a PLAYER. What gives us feel in golf? Acceleration creates lag pressure, pressure is felt. Can a light club be accelerated through the ball? Sure, but it’s too easy to over accelerate, and no matter how fast the velocity, when there’s no more acceleration, there’s no more feel. Heavy clubs give us needed resistance to accelerate slow and continue through and beyond the ball. Point being to PRESERVE FEEL as much as possible.
Sorry this was a little rambling, I’m not great at communicating this in a written form, and it’s a quirky analogy in some respects, but for me it really solidified why I shouldn’t be using anything that makes things ‘easier’, because ‘easier’ ends up being a lot harder… no feel!
