You offer "years of walnut experience" as if it's patently silly to do so, but woods vary quite a lot by many relevant characteristics, and if someone showed up

You offer "years of walnut experience" as if it's patently silly to do so, but woods vary quite a lot by many relevant characteristics, and if someone showed up for a walnut job having worked exclusively with maple, I'd be sceptical just because I've been learning the difference first-hand between the two. Walnut is brittle and open-grained and presents a different set of challenges than a forgiving close-grained wood like maple or birch. It's like someone interviewing for a Python position saying "I've got zero Python experience but a lot of JavaScript experience, but how different can they be? They're both interpreted languages used for scripting and web dev, right?" I might not reject them out of hand, but I'm going to prefer a comparable candidate whose direct experience is with Python.