It's the system! ...Solid Wing Chun does not rely on a student ' making it work' or ' so and so made it work' etc etc. You will never hear that a student of HKM ,TST or WSL took the system and was able to make it work. It should just work as taught right out of the box.
Please allow me to respond to this philosophically,
in a general sense without speaking to a specific MA or WC lineage. As a trained artist and art teacher, as well as martial artist, it's a topic to which I've given some considerable thought.
I've never seen a
system so good that you can teach it to an idiot, with no ability, no drive, and no discipline and find that it will still work! on the other hand, I
have seen second-rate martial arts taught to first-rate fighters, and they still make it work... although admittedly being disadvantaged.
It's this synergy between the science or "system" and individual that makes what we do an "art". Science demands
replicability. If any two competent lab-technicians perform the identical experiment using identical procedures, they will get identical results.
With an art, any two
individual artists (be they musicians, painters, sculptors, dancers, swordsmiths,
martial artists, or whatever) may employ identical techniques, but the results are not replicable, they are
unique to the individual. The results may be similar, but they are still unique... that's why we use the term "one of a kind" to describe true works of art. I believe the same is true of the martial
arts as much as we try to make it into
science. And it will stay that way until individual martial artists are replaced by identical robots!
Perhaps the problem is just that we live in an age that glorifies "science" over "art". We love to use words like "science" and "system", thinking that they imply a superior level of logic and achIevement. It's worth remembering that long before the era of modern "science" which barely dates back to the enlightenment, brilliant artists and craftsmen used the same logical progression we now call the "scientific method" to solve problems through experimentation and develop unequaled handiwork. But in a pre-industrial era, those achievements were still dependent on the synthesis of knowledge with the skill and "touch" of the artist. After all, isn't this kind of artistic mastery achieved through hard won knowledge the very essence of what is implied by the term "kung fu"?