I agree. Obviously point tournaments used to be based on the premise that the strikes were too strong to use with contact so you pull the punch very slightly short. When I started out, the dojo sparring was based on no contact to the face (often more theory than practice) but the non-contacting strikes still had to be powerful so that they would damage if they had hit. As you say, the tournament rules have altered the training so that it is a game of tag. That said, I suspect Kyokushin v Kyokushin would be a lot rougher than the clips and UK and Japanese Shotokan tournaments from the '70s and '80's often resulted in knockouts and hard contact despite the non-contact rule. WUKO seems to have changed all that.

After 25 pages of people comparing "karate" punching to boxing, this is the main event and the punching looks like a bunch of sloppy boxing learned off the tv. I saw no real distivitive puching "style" found in karate that is so oftern talked about.