[pickpocket]

Spaceman -
I think it just boils down to a difference in philosophy. While I'm a stickler for safety, I also believe that you don't practice for the Super Bowl by playing flag football. That's not to say that I think standard training in the fundamentals is by any means just "flag football"... what I'm trying to say is that once in a while you have to turn the training up a notch.
Something that bears mentioning is that just because I advocate training as tough and difficult as you can make it, I also don't think that training should be sustained at that level for longer than it has to be - meaning that you spend a lot of time on the fundamentals and less time on the high-speed/low-drag techniques. However, the high-speed training still needs to get done.

How many times have you left a class/course/training session and said to yourself, "I wasn't challenged as much as I could have been"...?
I'm all about establishing an operator's confidence both in himself and his equipment...and the only way you can do that is to test them - and not gently.
Doing so inherrently creates unsafe situations - which is why only certain people should be trained at this level. But it still needs to be done. We soften our philosophies and methodologies because we're afraid of that one-in-a-million chance that someone could get hurt during training...we're afraid of what the world will think of us...we're afraid of getting sued.
I spent too many years listening to the politic-aware officer crowd of the military dilute our training...too afraid to get a bruise, too afraid to make someone's mom upset. Too afraid to do what they came there to do.
Accidents happen. We are several times more likely to die in a car accident than we are by a freak training accident...and yet we're MORE worried about the latter.

But you know what I'm more afraid of? I'm more afraid of the fact that 9 out of 10 SRT officers that have been asked to take a shot to either side of their partners (on a square-range, in a safe training environment) either didn't trust themselves enough or weren't trusted by their partners enough to take the shot. They were not even willing to step up to the plate.
That bothers me. There is something fundamentally wrong with not having the confidence in one's abilities and equipment to not perform as expected.

Sorry - that started out as an agree-to-disagree post and ended up more as a general rant.