This is an explanation of why
it's okay the roundhouse kick isn't present, but still doesn't clear up why it isn't present to begin with. Is it an oversight? Is it omitted because of aesthetic reasons, that straight kicks look better? Is it because the creators of the forms felt like
@GojuTommy that the roundhouse kick wasn't practical for their purposes? Or alternatively, because it shows up so much in other training it was pointless to add into the kata?
I'm biased from my TKD experience, but the roundhouse kick is
the kick in TKD. If you could only learn one kick and be effective in TKD sparring, it would be the roundhouse kick. If I were told to only teach one kick in the white belt class, out of the basic kicks, I would choose the roundhouse, because virtually every combination involves a roundhouse at some point. We do them all of the time. Yet, our official forms have 1 form with a couple of roundhouse kicks, and that's it.
While I don't expect the forms to be comprehensive technical appendices of the art, I would think that the kick that is the identity of TKD would show up in the forms. Obviously, the roundhouse kick is less important to Karate than it is to TKD (not saying it isn't important in Karate, but it isn't
the technique in Karate), so this criticism doesn't apply to Karate. And I may be way off-base.
From the TKD forms, it would be like going to a Microsoft museum and not seeing Windows. I wouldn't expect every version of Windows (for example, they might purposefully omit Vista), but I would expect to at least see one instance of their flagship operating system that's basically ruled the world for the last 30 years. From the Karate forms, maybe it's more like going to a Microsoft museum and not seeing Solitaire; something that is very present on Microsoft OS, but not necessarily the focal point.
