I for one am not a guy to hop on any bandwagon and I love to play the Devil's Advocate. The question begs of pilot quality: Were the Finn's that good or were the Soviets that bad? I mean really, it isn't like the Finn's were at the fore front of aviation development. Training? Technology? ACM's? The RAF, Luftwaffe, USAAF, Japan, and even the Soviets can all claim a piece of that pie. Heck, even the Poles can at least stand on the PZL P.11 as an achievement. Did the Finn's get some uber training that no one else knew about? Did they dump in some super juice in the fuel tank when no one was watching? I will give the Finn's the benefit of the doubt with the k/d ratio, it is impressive. But when supposedly the Buffalo was the bottom of the barrel in the PTO, ETO, and MTO, yet do so well up north in the frigid air over Finland one has to wonder was it the Finn's that were really that good or was it is the Soviets who were really that bad??? And... just how much effort would it take for HTC to add in the version, the version we all were expecting in the first place, to be added in to AH because in EW scenarios the Brewster has every advantage over the Zekes and little needs to be said about that. 
Please do not assume that I do not respect the Finnish pilots for their achievements and sacrifices in protecting their country, I hold them in nothing but the highest regards.
It was not like the Finns were superpilots and the Russians were the equivallent of two weeker number guys, but the quality disparity was likely high. It is not just how much you train your pilots, is it HOW you train your pilots and how you select them in the first place. If the Finns could select from the top 0.01% of their population and the Russian just took anyone that could sing the communist party anthem, you'd get a huge quality difference no matter how you train them.
Why are the Israeli pilots considered so good? The IAF gets first pick of all recruits and since in Israel service is obligatory, they effectively get to pick from the best potentials of the entire population (in countries with voluntary service who usually enlist? there is already a population bias there). There is also a very cruel filtering process and only few get to finish their training (less than 10% of those that started). The number of advanced training hours is perhaps high, but not exceedingly so relative to other airforces. It is the intensity and the level of training followed by very effective in-your-face debrief without any consideration towards anyone's ego. For example, the IAF insists on practicing multi-plane dogfighting at cannon ranges even though this is not likely to represent modern aerial combat. They consider it good general skills training for the pilots. When practicing actual tactics they usually set up very complicated scenarios. Any country that will follow that pattern will end up with a high quality airforce at the expense of size and expenses per combat AC.
So quality is difficult to compare since there are no objective parameters. The older the technology, the more was the emphasis on the individual skill of the pilots. In Finland vs. Russia I believe the quality made a huge difference. It was not in the genes, it was in the selection, training and tactics employed. The quality of the plane was a modifier on top of that.
