One of the things that karateka who are very big on realistic bunkai for classical Okinawan/Japanese kata are always reminding you is that it's the applications that are important, and in a real street dustup, what you will be doing will be anything but elegant performance in a traditional manner. But they also emphasize that if you really understand the strategy, tactics and mechanics that the kata are trying to teach you, even a ragged-looking application of those lessons could well be a `perfect' execution, because you did implement the management of the fight as the kata `shows' you.
The problem I think is that traditionalists suspect the modifications of the kata may sacrifice some of that instructional contentor close to all of it, as in the case of Ms. Bruce's martial floor routinefor dramatic/athletic/gymnastic effect. The idea, I think, is that if you keep the form as clean and traditional as possible, the visibility of the instructions encoded there will be most easily recoverable. Someone Bill Burgar does modify the kata, but as he shows in his book Five Years, One Kata, the modifications are in the direction of making the applications more visible, less hidden under the stylized movement that were part of the conventions followed by the early pioneers, who could be pretty sure that any of their senior students who looked at what they were doing would know what combat moves were intended. This kind of modification is a far cryreally, it runs 180º away fromthe kinds of acrobatic spectable that we see in performances such as Ms. Bruce's and that of other `XMA' acrobats.
