The big problem with most of these and all SD performances is that most of the people we see are folks who just learned these forms. Every demo of SD or CSC I have ever seen or participated in looks about the same as the above. By the very nature of the system, every form they know is one which was just learned. As soon as you have memorized the order of postures, it's time to start learning the next form. Proper stance, power generation, movement and connectiveness etc are not really adressed. Rapid, snappy, imprecise hand and arm movements substitute for proper force delivery in most cases, and low, static stances substitute for footwork, since no method of body connectivity is really taught. You have to figure that stuff out for yourself on your own time (which is impossible if you have no background in any other kind of martial art). The instructor isn't going to dwell on the details of a form for more than a month or two, sometimes less, before it's time for the next one. After that, no matter how much you practice it on your own, you aren't going to improve much without correction and guidance. This has been the way of instruction for a few generations of students now, so even if they changed their ways, most of the instructors couldn't give any more guidance without input from an outside style. It does not speak well for most of the instructors and Sin The himself that this type of performance goes uncorrected. The bad habits and movements of his most senior student are a bad sign, indicating that he himself doesn't really know much about the internal arts especially. I am glad I was introduced to so many styles which I had never heard of before, and got a basic idea of what they were about, and learned the order of the movements, but that is all it can be. You have to go out of the system for instruction in internal styles particularly, even the most elder masters are not doing them correctly. Just having the same order of movements is not the same as performing a form correctly. It did save me time in memorizing which posture comes next in the taijiquan forms, but I had to relearn how to move, and correct many details of the movements.
The best you can say is that SD/CSC teaches their own style of "internal" art, just as they teach their own style of everything, and it really shouldn't be called taijiquan, baguazhang, xingyiquan, etc. It is their own thing, Sin The's thing, which he created over the framework of the postures of traditional forms. I would say that this separate SD style could use a lot of improvement, and that the traditional arts are better constructed and make better use of the body. It is a style created by someone who I think had more enthusiasm for martial arts than experience in martial arts. His and his students' desire to embrace and emulate all sorts of martial arts (particularly Chinese kung fu), and being without the regular guidance of an experienced instructor, led to a superficial mimicry rather than a really effective system.
My personal speculation begins here: What he actually learned from his teacher or teachers as a child and a teen I'm sure was fairly limited. I know what I had learned from the time I was 11 until the time I was 21 was the eighteen kata and basics of my karate style. Sin The mastered hundreds of forms from multiple and complex martial arts styles in that amount of time? I'm not saying I am anything special, but I do learn martial arts quickly. Even if he were some sort of martial arts prodigy, that is not believable. My guess is, he knew 20-25 forms max, as well as some line drills and techniques, like the short forms and chin na, when he came to the US at the age of 19 or 20. This is what he taught his original students, drilling them hard, probably in the same way he was taught. At some point he yearned for more, as would be natural at that age, but rather than seeking out another teacher his ego got the better of him, and he started teaching himself material from books and inventing some of his own. Instead of telling his students where he was getting the material, he told them it all came from his teacher in Indonesia, he had known it all along and had decidede they were now ready for this new material. Maybe they believed him, maybe they didn't, but either way they played along and perpetuated his ego stories to their own students. Soon it became more about making money and selling forms than about the training, and that motive transformed what might have been a decent Indonesian/Chinese kuntao style into the monster it is today. I can't fault Sin The or his students for wanting to learn as much as they could, from everywhere they could. I don't even fault him for trying to learn new things from books, people have done that for centuries, and I'm guilty of receiving guidance from books and videos as well. I fault them for allowing a misguided ego fantasy to replace honest training and personal integrity with a self-aggrandizing scheme to make money and become a movie star (which never happened of course, although apparently Sin The may actually be getting his movie made in China soon, although he's been trying to do that for years and always says it's just on the horizon).
There may be something in there worth salvaging, but it will need to be stripped down and returned to its roots. And it would help to hear the truth from Sin The and his senior students/teachers (I don't believe even the deposition testimony was necessarily the truth). A pipedream, of course.
Forgive the longwindedness, I just felt like talking about this I guess.
