Water Dragon, what’d you expect, man? Too many avenues of discussion when you ask such open-ended questions. I think it’s going along nicely. 
Hey, the answer, as always, is somewhere in the middle. I apologize for vaguely hijacking the thread, but I figured I’d trot out the “things MMA types,” are tired of hearing from TMA practicioners, since it seems to be so popular the other way round.
I don’t knock “TMA’s” on their “effectiveness,” whatever that actually means.
I knock bad training. Period. And the simple fact is that training for full contact ringsports is generally GOOD training. There are some adjustments that have to be made for “street fighting,” but those adjustments fall under the category of situational awareness, etc. I mean, your tactics change depending on the circumstances, whether you train for the ring or not.
Bad training includes a lot of different things, but it all boils down to one very simple statement: Bad training is training for an untrained, unconditioned opponent. My favorite examples are Martial Artists, when asked to demonstrate one or two possible ways of dealing with a Boxer’s hook, trot out a defense to the drunken roundhouse swipe that would get them buttraped by a competent boxer, or the equally silly “defenses to a shot,” that are actually not very good defenses to the “drunken frat boy head down tackle.” Do all “TMA’s” train in this horrible way? Of course not, and I don’t mean to insinuate that they do.
So, Water Dragon–Kung Fu could benefit from a more full contact sportive emphasis. The reason is that ringfighters can’t afford to assume their opponents are untrained and consequently train to deal with a trained opponent–they get that exposure to the boxer’s hook and good takedowns, and what not, and deal with them constantly against trained, conditioned training partners… need I remind you how comparatively easy it is to throw somebody unfamiliar with grappling? 
Or hit somebody who has never sparred…
So it’s more in the attitude of the training than the “style.”
Sorry, this was a horribly long, muddled mess. I don’t mean it to be insulting to TMA… only to **** poor training