A variation on Fujian White Crane
Alright, I don't have familiarity with the curriculum, but i train in Tibetan white crane, quite different.
I have trained some other systems that definitely have some very large curriculums, which in my opinion do reach the level of being cumbersome and unwieldy. I no longer train in those.
That being said, I am a fan of getting more mileage out of less material. And my system has about a dozen and a half long forms, and maybe a dozen or more weapons forms.
The thing is, you don't need anywhere near this much material to be able to fight. Our fundamentals really cover it quite well. My belief is that these large curriculums get built over time by generations of people who saw some need (real or imagined) for it. Keep in mind, no system sprang forth fully formed from nothing. If the system is older than a couple generations, or you can trace its history and roots to older material, I am certain that it did not originally contain all the material it has now.
In my opinion, forms and other bits of the curriculum should not be viewed as stuff you need, like a shopping list of things you need to have. It is useful stuff, but it should be viewed as possibilities that give you grist for your mill to work with in ultimately devising your own solutions to the problems you are presented with. So they are possibilities, they are not obligations. They are a useful training tool, but you don't NEED to be able to use everything in them, and some may be un-useable because of various reasons like, they get deep into theory and maybe depart from reality a bit, but still have useful lessons to teach.
One observation I have had is that when my sifu breaks down the form and shows applications, more often than not it boils down to a handful of fundamental applications. All this movement found in all these forms, are just variations on a small number of useful applications.
The material, including many forms, is meant to help you understand and develop some skills, but you certainly don't need it all. It is just a wide range of possibilities that help broaden your vision of what is possible. If, for example, you have learned six forms and within that process the usefulness has come together for you, you really don't need to learn six or twelve more. The six you learned have done the job they were designed for. On the other hand, if you have learned six and you still don't "get it", learning another six or a dozen or whatever, isnt likely to help you much. I think there must be something fundamental you are missing.
If you learn and know more stuff, well it can be useful to have, but if you don't have it, you probably aren't actually missing anything.
So, there can definitely be material to the point of clutter. But the heart of the system is likely very useful. You, as a student, need to be able to step back and decide, I have enough material now, learning more will just get in the way.
