I don't mean to be flippant, but it's the only way I can describe my thought. Is this like the Star Trek "borg" idea? Assimiliate, so there's no distictiveness? "We're all one?"
Iceman, I don't think there's anything flippant in the least about your comment. It sums up my own thinking about `Kwan unification' exactly. The pressure to give up the individual curricula and technical bases of the different kwans came from the desire of the ROK military for a combative standard. To me, it flies in the face of what nature is constantly reminding us: monoclonal environments are much more fragile than those with a lot of diversity. In a diverse environment, competing ideas get tested and pushed to improve by the competition; by constrast, when there's forced conformity, with top-down control of technical development, things are much less likely to stand or fall on their own merits. Not so good for the art, IMO...