I always come across great threads late in the game.
I had a similar experience with TKD early on. The ATA was going through its "Holy Cow? We could be Sued!" phase, and everyone was being required to buy body armor to spar. I don't mean at tournaments, I mean just in regular old class, mandatory everything protection. TO a kid trying to find out if this stuff works, it was a bad look. I took the opportunity to change when forced to it, switching to the WTF and got into the shocking-impact rules set, which helped for a while, but with the tiny little tunnels into which kicks/punches could score, I started to question it pretty quick, too.
And then I found hapkido. That was great, did that for a good length of time until my instructor/friend decided to up ship and move himself to upstate New York to open a school in an affluent area (his wife was tired of Texas summers). So that went away. Frustrating. Moved, and a buddy of mine was starting into Muay Thai, he'd been going a couple of weeks, loved it. His experience was karate, but it almost paralleled my own TKD. We both wanted more reality.
Um.. Muay Thai delivers reality. In spades. So I did that for some years, and had to move again for grad stuff. Found a buddy, who happened to (his family, actually) owned a judo/TKD school. So, I started judo. Loved it, wasn't good at it... way too much power being used. Mongo Grab! Mongo Toss! Not pretty. But, lots of fun, and they had patience with me and, with tricks like doing randori with only my forefingers and thumbs used to hold the opponents jacket... I started to progress.
And so on for the next 20-odd years.
It's a road, and we really don't know to where it is going to take us. But, the road is both too long, and too short, to not enjoy the ride.
