I think the answer is "all of them". Or none of them. Or something like that.

The person who owns 20 snakes for one year, assuming they got all hatchlings, has ZERO experience with snakes older than 1 year old. But the person with 1 snake for 20 years has ZERO experience with snakes different from their snake in some way, whether it be male/female, easy feeder/picky feeder, whatever.

The person who has had 50 snakes, but they've always been healthy, has ZERO experience with RIs. But the person with one snake that got an RI, again, has ZERO experience with different snakes.

A really well read "book expert" will know things that they have never experienced, but if the knowledge still gives the right answer, does it matter if they have experienced it firsthand? Sometimes it will, sometimes it won't. Depends on how easily the question at hand can be learned from a book. Sometimes in their reading they'll have stumbled across things that someone with lots of hands-on experience might not know.

You don't even mention the person with 20 years of experience with BPs, 1000's of them, breeding them, and illnesses, and etc., but all BPs, versus someone with only 1 year of experience, but they've had 50 different species.

Fact is, different ones have more or less knowledge about different things. While it is pretty easy to determine who is a beginner, determining who the experts are is a lot harder, because there is no single measuring stick that is the only one that matters.