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Lineage is noteworthy but it isn't a 100% guarantee. I can easily trace my lineage to Funakoshi himself but I still got taught to move in straight lines and block kicks with Gedan Barai. I think the fact that the Japanese added so much Kendo flavor to Shotokan is also to blame. Then nobody really questioned it when Karate came to Europe and the US. And now you have WKF style training which looks nothing like the Okinawan original art.Jeez man, bummed you got the mall MA base for your training.
How I've been told from David the USMC guy I trained with, stationed in Okinawa is back during reconstruction in the 50's guys serving one year deployments would train, and come back stateside with just the beginner basics and try to cobble together a coherent version of the total ass kicking's they'd suffered back in Japan. Japanese instructors would "award" a BB knowing that they had not given the true art to the "Gaijin". If you research closely you'll see that most of the famous American Karate guys only had a year or so of formal training but were good athletes and developed their "art" from broken systems. David is fortunate enough to have excelled at language and re deployed as a translator liaison for years so he could spend the 6 plus years it takes to absorb GoJu and a large part of Okinawan Kempo.
That's why I always ask about lineage. If you can't directly trace it back to it's roots then most likely it's a cobbled together system that doesn't represent the full art. The Northeast has great Judo, TKD and other arts due to the draw of university faculty, students and culture from other nations. So I stumbled on direct lineage training by dumb geographical luck.