I really love your point of view on the matter. My gym is very strong on sparring wich means that there's less time for techniques. The coach also seem to want the blue belts and purple belts to learn new stuff even in the beginners' class. For an exemple, on the last begginers class, we learned a variant of the scissor sweep, when a lot of white belts can't even do a scissor sweep and a complex north south lapel choke. I was with a girl in her first month at the gym and she had no clue what was going on.
So when the ''first class'' started a couple years ago, everybody was learning the basics at the same time. The new folks are basically entering the curriculum ''mid-semester''.
I'm lucky that I was very much into the sport before going there and that I had some basics from my MMA class where we really learned the basics (like shrimping for getting out of side mount
).
I also watch a lot of videos. I rarely go from scratch on something that I have never seen in class but I take a subject about what happened in sparring or about a technique we learned and just go from there.
I still go to my MMA grappling class where we spend most of the time on drilling the basics and it always help me out for my BJJ sparrings
When you think about it, Gracie academy/ university gets a lot of shit for their combative stuff and the no sparring in the first year, but at least they get the basics right. From what I've heard Gracie Barra is also very strong on the curriculum and what you should know before getting promoted, I don't know if it's spread across the 400 schools but I heard it's that way in my area. But it doesn't mean that they will teach you the basic, just that you won't get promoted if you don't have them.