You should read "A Killing Art" -- the main thesis of the entire book is that Choi spent his life trying to distinguish taekwondo from karate...so no, you're definitely not the only one! Personally I think Gillis over-states his case for the sake of telling a ripping yarn, but still....it's a must-read.
Some relevant excerpts:
A Killing Art: The Untold History of Tae Kwon Do, Updated and Revised: Alex Gillis: 9781770413009: Amazon.com: Books
“Why do you withdraw your hand after the strike?” the General asks him. The black belt explains that he is ripping off the opponent's scrotum. “No,” General says. “That's Karate and WTF style.”
That reminds the General of a joke: “A woman told another, ‘Don't marry a guy who studied WTF.' ‘Why?' asks the second woman. ‘Because he has no weapon,' said the first.”
Another one of his refrains is “This is a bad habit from Karate,” as if bad habits pass through dynasties, handed from instructor to instructor. But what the General is not telling us is that he developed Tae Kwon Do from Shotokan Karate and has been trying to cover his Karate roots for fifty years.
---
To anyone who did not know the martial arts, the two blocks looked identical and protected the same area. Choi had simply moved the arm a couple of inches to the right, so that it stopped in front of the belly instead of to the side of the belly. For Choi, though, this was a start. He began thinking about a new martial art, one that would be better than Karate...
---
Never one to give up, he began writing a Tae Kwon Do book, and after 1957, when Shotokan Karate's founder, Gichin Funakoshi, died, Choi borrowed many of his ideas and words. Choi felt that he was improving Karate. He wanted Korea to have its own art, one that would be superior to anything from Japan, but his lies were outrageous now: he accused Japan of taking Korea's T'aekkyon and renaming it Karate during Japan's occupation of Korea before the Second World War.
Choi loathed the Japanese, whose armies and governments had bullied Korea. He thought nothing of stealing Funakoshi's “elbow,” “ball of the foot,” “back of the heel,” and “sword foot.” [13] It was only fair, perhaps, because Funakoshi had originally borrowed them from Chinese martial arts. Choi also took the “sword hand,” “four-finger spear hand,” and “two-finger spear hand,” all of which appeared in Funakoshi's 1943 Japanese-language book, Karate-Do Nyumon. Funakoshi wrote that to strengthen a fist, one should punch a tapered wooden post. [14] Choi described exactly the same post for Tae Kwon Do, and included Funakoshi's advice to bury it one-third in the ground and wrap it in rice straw at the top. These all went into Choi's book.
His five-year-old creation myth became beautifully simple: “Tae Kwon Do is an ancient, Korean martial art,” a claim that would be emblazoned on gym walls and people's minds for the next fifty years. Always the dramatic storyteller, he added wondrous 1,300-year-old anecdotes about the hwarang warriors: “T'aekkyon was so advanced that the history books of that period describe martial artists jumping over the high walls and attacking the enemy on the other side.” Another, wrote Choi, described martial artists, “kicking a ceiling after jumping from a sitting position.” [15] The jumps were possibly the only true part of the myth, but the hwarang could not leap through time.
Gillis, Alex (2008-11-20). A Killing Art: The Untold History of Tae Kwon Do (Kindle Locations 1157-1170). ECW Press. Kindle Edition.
...there's tons more, but you get the idea. You should give this a read. I don't know that it would
directly answer any of your questions, but it might illustrate how complex, subtle, and nuanced any meaningful answer has to be.
========
The analogy I like to use with people is this: suppose Al-Qaeda took over the U.S. and outlawed Christmas for 40 years. All the Christmas tree farms have been converted into corn fields, all the sheet music for Christmas carols have been burned, all the factories that made ornaments have shut down, and nobody remembers any Christmas recipes. Every book, article, and recording relating to Christmas has been destroyed.
Nobody has sung a carol, decorated a tree, or seen a Christmas movie for a generation and a half. The only memories that people have of traditional Christmas are 40 years old. Some of the older people have some dim childhood memories of Christmas, but that's about it. People under 40 have never seen a Christmas at all. Your children and grandchildren have never celebrated Christmas.
Worse, if you wanted to get a decent job during those 40 years -- and not have your sisters and daughters be abducted and raped -- you had to covert to Islam. So not only have you NOT been celebrating Christmas, you've been celebrating Islamic holidays instead.
Now...oh happy day!...the occupation is over after 40 years, and you're allowed to recreate Christmas. Where would you even begin?
- Would your "New Christmas" wind up incorporating some of the Islamic traditions that you have been using for the last 40 years? Yah probably.
- Would your childhood memories of Christmas inspire you to change these traditions in important ways? Yah definitely!
- Would you want to admit that there were any "Islamic traditions" at all in your New Christmas -- probably not.
Your New Christmas would probably wind up being some weird mashup of Islamic traditions that are your recent memories, and very old memories of Christmas traditions that you're not quite sure you're recollecting correctly -- but you sure as hell will do anything to make sure get incorporated into the New Christmas that all your grandchildren will now start celebrating.
I imagine it was probably kinda like that, with you doing your best to take dim memories of taekkyon and other indigenous traditions and mashing them up into your recent knowledge of karate, to try to make something that would honor the Korean traditions of the past to the best of your ability.
So personally, I say...let's cut the original taekwondo pioneers a little slack. We haven't lived through what they lived through...not even close.
