I trained Wing Chun for nearly three years. The Chun is something you really have to experience in order to realize it's shortcomings, because on paper it sounds pretty good.
There are many differences between the different lineages, but they do share a major common theme - basing all their techniques and strategies on scientific principles. It's gotten to the point that they ignore alot of the randomness that's found in a live encounter. This is evident from watching any sort of Wing Chun demo, where two practitioners will cross hands in a beautifully choreographed, flowing exchange. Even their chi sao drill, an exercise of sensitivity with a little more resistance than your typical demo, looks pretty nice - lots of bong saos, tan saos, fook saos, and crazy combinations of all the different moves based on a single point of contact. However, it all falls apart when you reintroduce the stochastity - watch a vid of a chunner in competition or ammy fight, and always the top criticism is "what happened to all the chun, that looks like sloppy kickboxing + spazzy chain punching."
Furthermore, there's an emphasis on "the deadly" - ie the bil jee, the knee stomps, the throat knuckle punches, groin stabs, etc. This is often used by most chunners as reasons why Wing Chun is not effective in the ring or cage. If you can't hit a person in the chest or abdomen properly, how do you believe you will manage to hit a person's eyeball? The majority of techniques in ANY system are always the basics, not "the deadlies." IMO one should be able to take the system and apply it to a system of rules like Unified MMA, because it leaves no room for flashiness and flowery nonsense and brings out the effective basics and dependable combinations one can derive. Be able to do that first before even thinking about poking eye balls out and crunching testicles in your fists.
And on top of all that, the Wing Chun culture even hampers its evolution. The system is touted in some lineages as a system that was created from the strengths of other styles in order to allow smaller, weaker fighter to overcome a larger, stronger opponent - and to do so in a relatively minimum amount of training time. So chunners start off with a superiority complex - and the state of politics makes it even worse with the lineage wars. They feel as if their kung fu not only is better than other forms of kung fu from which it originated, but that their specific lineage is better than any other lineage. Hard to embrace change and limitation when that's what's been taught as your system's history from day one. Interestingly enough, with the passing of Helio, we're beginning to see some similar lineage fighting in the Gracie line - if you'd like to see the parallels, go read the "Renzo's response to Relson's comments" thread in the Grappling Subforum...
In any case, we have a system that suffers the typical "TMA" shortcomings: lack of willingness to accept limitation and change with the times, an archaic system that is kept as such by blind adherence to tradition and disregard for proper resistance and pressure testing. Does this go for everyone in Wing Chun? No. Especially in Europe, we are seeing some chunners go through ammy MMA. Does this mean there are no good Wing Chun fighters? No, there are some out there of course by sheer statistics. But the fact of the matter is, when the majority of a system's practitioners cannot or will not use the system to it's fullest potential, when the minority of the practitioners are the ones fighting, then the system as a whole suffers. With Wing Chun, the idea of system vs the fighter doesn't apply, because both are locked in a downward spiral.
