Who is to say that their standards are correct? (note: I have much respect for these sifus, I am merely trying to make a point) I brought this up before so I will again. Let's look at Sifu Lueng Ving Tsun vs. Sifu Cheung's Wing Chun. Which one is correct? They each have a different standard yet come from the same root. Result is you have a lot of confusion of what is right and wrong in this community which also results in watered down versions of the art.
OK, so now we come to what I think is a crucial subtext in the OP question: to make something better, you must improve it—make is 'more correct', if you like, but how do we know what 'more correct' is if we don't know what is correct in the first place?
To me this question is the true, hard crux. I used to be a downhill ski instructor, and we also were preoccupied with questions of technical correctness; but there was a difference. Everyone agreed that technical perfection would consist of those techniques which gave absolutely maximum results with a minimum of movement, and we actually had a test for that: it was called, success in racing. The great breakthrough in downhill ski technique came when the ski schools finally recognized that form has to follow function, that the best technique was that which let you do the most with the least, that this was what the racers were constantly pursuing, and that any discovery made by racers on one team would quickly be picked up by those on another and within a year or two—like windtunnel engineering's effect on automobile design in the last twenty years—everyone would be doing the same thing through the gates... till the next big breakthrough. In the early days, the Austrian Ski Federation tried to get a 'patent' on what was called counterrotation, and market it as a 'national skiing style' (everyone had to try to look like Stein Ericksen), but it turned out that the Austrian racers abandoned counterrotation, pretty as it looked (in those days, anyway) five to ten years before crowds at Sun Valley did and adopted the lean, efficient lateral weight transfer and other techs that the French had discovered. The point is, national 'branding' took a serious back place to engineering efficiency. And as ski instructors our job was to keep up with the measurable 'best practices' that were coming off the ski slopes in the form of racing results.
The picture in the MAs is vastly different, because there's nothing comparable to ski racing that yields an objective metric for efficiency. Tournament competition isn't remotely comparable, because the rules of competition in a sport MA contest have very little to do with the on-the-ground realities of street combat, so that it's totally implausible to say that tournament results correspond to engineering 'best practices' in the way that, in skiing, races do (where you have the skier, a set of obstacles to negotiate, not at all unrelated to what you'd encounter on any given skiable hill without any race going on) and a finish line, and the best engineering practices get you through those obstacles most efficiently. Style has no part in ski racing; but style, and national branding, has a
huge amount to do with what different versions of the MAs, or even different versions of the same MA, teach. The question, how do you know which one is correct, is at the heart of the matter: ITF, WTF, TSD, Subahk-Do, and various sport karate styles all impose different tournament sparring rules—none of them, so far as I'm aware, any closer to actual violent street conflict conditions than any other—and there is therefore no way that I can see to answer the question, which standard is correct, regardless of whether its an individual school or a large organization.
To determine 'which is correct', you would, so far as I can see, have to set up test conditions that served the same function for skiing that the problem of getting through a fixed course in minimum time serves for skiing. And that would probably be something about survival success in highly realistic simulations of street combat, along the lines that the British Combat Association instructors do. But absent something along those lines, I don't see how
anyone's definition of correctness can be taken as battle tested, except relative to completely artificial, stylized conventions of engagement, which is what tournament rules for any sport MA style
are. But those conventions are not, for the most part, rooted in anything like the conditions of violent civilian combat.
