I believe Wing Chun does look like Wing Chun in action , but it comes down to how you were trained.
People these days are in such a rush to learn a new trick every training session that they don't spend enough time on the basics like stance , Sil Lum Tao and pivoting.
Countless hours have to be spent on this stuff in order to build a good foundation and ingrain it into your mind and body.
I heard that Tsui Seung Tin would spend five hours just practicing pivoting , what modern day students would have the patience and fortitude to train like that these days.
Of course the commercial reality these days is that most schools would be empty if they trained this way still , these days they expect to be learning the wooden dummy inside a week of joining.
Once the basics are perfected then and only then should a student be allowed to progress to learning chi sau and all the various deflections and kicks.
These deflections must also be taught in a systematic way with the partner attacking in a predetermined sequence so that the student performs many hundreds of repetitions of the various defences.
Then the speed and intensity of the attacks are increased , if the student is coping ok with that and showing a certain degree of speed and correctness of movement .
Finally you can start to add mobility and limited randomness to the equation and then later total random attacks.
I remember watching my seniors spar and it didn't look like kick boxing or mma , I can see the strikes being executed in those styles.
But when I watched my seniors there would be an attack and then the counter attack would come and be over in half a second .
The hand techniques were so fast it was hard to say exactly what they were using , but you could certainly hear the noise on the other guys chest protector and then would come the finishing stamp kick , hook kick or elbow strike and sweep etc.
They could apply what they had learned by reflex because they had been there for years and put in the hard yards and many thousands upon thousands of repetitions .
I remember people asking Sigung Tsui all the time ,
Student: How can I make my punching faster and more powerful.
Sigung: Practice Sil Lum Tao.
Student: How can I make my kicks better.
Sigung: Practice Sil Lum Tao.
Student: How can I improve my reflexes.
Sigung: Practice Sil Lum Tao.
His answer was always the same and not really what they wanted to hear , because they thought it was so basic , they wanted some sort of magic bullet that would fast track their training .
But the answer was simple , you just have to put in a lot of work and time and a lot of that time is spent doing the form.
I truly believe that a person with a good grounding in Sil Lum Tao will beat the crap out of somebody who has completed the whole system in a rush.
Just to digress off topic a little, I would say I agree with the gist of what you say, mook jong, but I would add the following.
Although I truly believe that wing chun skills take time & hard work to aquire, I aslo believe the curriculum -- a well organised & logical approach to teaching -- plays an extremely important part. With one of my wing chun teachers, I'd to sit in the YJKYM for ages before he would even let me progress to yat chee keun. I would be taught 1 or two techniques only after he thought I'd performed the last techniques to a high standard, and it took me quite a long time to finish the first form. In fact, because it took me so long to complete, having bit & peices fed me over a long period of time, I had problems stringing the whole form together and remembering the sequences. However, with another teacher, he would teach you the whole form in a day, and he would be very casual about it. He's a very relaxed person, giving you no pressure to perform. With this later approach, I could remember everything very easy, and my skills advanced at a very rapid rate. Also, the specific drills which he conceived, brought out my attributes very quick. In all my travels seeking out high level wing chun, I've yet to see another method that brings out one's wing chun skills faster. In comparision, I would say students of over 20-years' experience would have problems with his students of 1 or 2-years' training.
Yes, hard work & time is a factor, but the quality of teaching is much more important in my opinion.
People would be surprised that I teach all my students SLT in less than 4-weeks, with 2 lessons per week. And if it were private lessons, I would teach them in 2- to 3 lessons.
All too often, people are spending far too long learning a style that purports to be quick to learn. In my experience, taking so long to learn may not be the best approach and doesn't guarantee quality.
