Pulling straight from the wiki for this one:
it is determined that resurrection through Human Transmutation is impossible because a soul that has left the mortal coil has passed on into the afterlife and can never be called back by human means. The attempt will cause a rebound due to both the inherent lack of any particular substance able to match a human soul in value and the fact that the initiated transmutation is reaching for an unattainable goal.
Ressurective Human Transmutation is, by definition and design, impossible. There is no earthly material capable of matching the inherent value of a particular soul considering how unique an individual is, and the effort to reach the afterlife to fish someone out even if you could matched he value is simply unattainable for a practice grounded in the material world like Alchemy.
It is,
potentially possible, to reach the theoretical threshold of true resurrection with the Philosopher's Stone. But though it appears to defy the law of Equivalent Exchange, the law truly is absolute, and the Stone's souls are consumed relative to the user's talent and skill level with Alchemy. As such, there is literally no way to know if a Stone is powerful enough to achieve resurrection, and a failed attempt will as good as kill you.
Sacrificing one's Gate, the inherent ability to understand and preform Alchemy, is also an option when undergoing Human Transmutation, and succeeded in restoring Alphonse to the material world. But that was an extremely atypical situation, where Alphonse didn't quite die so much as get spirited beyond Truth's Gate, and the Gate being sacrificed belong to quite possibly the most powerful Alchemist in the world, who had preformed Human Transmutation a number of times before.
Truth himself said that the latter method was "the right answer", implying that the sacrifice of the ability to do Alchemy, the loss of the ability to ever do any such thing ever again, is an Equivalent Exchange for a deceased soul. But then, maybe not.
Victor is unable to know just about any of this, and hasn't even considered how inherently invaluable someone's soul is. He's going to approach this like any other material transmutation, disbelieving in the possibility that there's more to reality than can be accounted for by science and logic, and he's going to meet God. And God is going to take his fair share of flesh out of the encounter.
Purely in theory, Joe could possibly succeed at ressurective Human Transmutation without suffering a permanent toll or winding up with a meat pile. This wouldn't be due to his skill at Alchemy, but due to his myriad supporting powers permitting him mystical and divine means to meet a soul's irreplaceable value.
