The most popular styles have been altered from the Okinawan original. You won't find much grappling in Shotokan and its main variants. They're being taught as they are--very striking-focused systems. I prefer the Okinawan systems but alteration happens. If karate couldn't be altered there'd be no Tae Kwon Do; and in fact, Okinawan karate is primarily altered Southern Chinese kung fu. In general, evolution like this is healthy--whether a given art fits your needs or not, it creates many to choose from with their own innovations.
I fully agree that most have been changed from the way they were originally taught. And though change
can be good in many things, I don't think this would necessarily be one of them. By turning Karate into a predominately strike/kicking art you have in essense watered it down. Now this could have been on purpose to make it more kid-friendly (Itosu), it could have been to make turn it into a sport-oriented art or it could have been simply because the instructor at some point didn't have the full knowledge of the system and in turn taught it to students who later became instructors and so forth. Anyway you slice it, information was removed or not learned. In some cases it was necesary such as teaching children or adjusting the art to a sport environment. We don't really want to be teaching children to choke each other out etc. But I think that, at least originally, the thought was to teach the children the basic movements and later in life they learn more advanced applications from the same movements. That is my personal belief and it makes sense.
I think a lot of servicemen (from the allied countries) learned a
form of Karate after WWII and took that basic knowledge back home with them, but were not trained fully in the arts. Whether this was due to lack of training time before rotation back stateside (or whatever country) or a desire not to teach the
invaders the full art or a combination of both. This has long been my contention on the art of TKD in that very few Koreans knew the full art and therefore it wasn't passed on in any meaningful way. Rather the block/punch/kick version of the art was learned enmass and passed on to subsequent generations who in turn became instructors and passed it on etc. This doesn't mean a particular art sucks per se, just that it is less than what it came from. Uechi Ryu, in my opinion suffered from something similar. First, I don't believe Uechi Kanbun Sensei learned the full art of Pangainoon. Certainly he did not learn the fourth kata, bringing only three back to Okinawa. Secondly, much information on the art was lost in a house fire after his passing. All Uechi Kanei Sensei had at that point was the knowledge that was passed on to him at that point. So we have two consecutive points of diminishing return so-to-speak.
Learning the block/punch/kick aspect, from the point of the totality of an art, is relatively easy. Learning the the more advance applications such as the OP presented can be quite an indepth undertaking. It requires dedication, experience, patience and all that sort of martial artsy stuff. Some simply don't want to muck around with all that stuff in their quest to become a master or grandmaster or supreme grandmaster. But on the flip side, it is there for those that aren't in a hurry.
