I enjoy how often we keep going around the same issues.

In most part it's due to faulty language. Things like Modern Versions of Karate have moved away from Kata.

In its origins if you don't have kata, you don't have karate. I firmly belive that. Okinawn arts without kata didn't suck up and borrow the name Karate, they developed their own traditions... of course it's even interesting (according to Bishop) that some of the modern versions of those other arts have developed kata too.

In my experience, practicing kata over 3+ decades, what kata does and is is a very wide thing. Lots of places its just moves strung together. But there are places where it forms the basis for technique application as the soul source, and there are places where kata represent thousands of techniques, and applications, and tremendous work on the underlying principles to truly advance in ones art.

I have never seen anyone who has trained in a rich use of a kata tradition find that training worthless and then throw it aside to develop something else.

I have seen beginners, who have their own vision of what they want, leave to find it elsewhere, which is hardly the same as throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

This is where it is almost impossible to be on the same page in these discussions, because we're almost always talking about different things.

I've been forunate to meet a few people from this list, ones that are from different traditions than my own, and I think in person I have made some small inroads to showing some of the value my study of kata has brought.

Nor just because I use kata as a major tool, does it preclude me using other tools.

But the truth is we all touch a fraction of 1% our the art's potentials, there is no doubt our fraction of 1% is different from each others.

Frankly, I'm not very good, nor do I know much, but from what I've seen, and from who've I've trained with, I have yet to see a system of training, based on karate principles, without kata that I would give reason to study.