Well hopefully the non Chinese Tma folks can weigh in too!
I at the time when i was able to thought to entertain the idea of competing in MMA and at the time grudge just so happened to move right across the street from me. I realized i had foolishly ( and regret now) that i passed up the oppurtunity to grapple years ago so that encouraged me to join even more .
Previous to that i had done abit of kung fu at Csc when i was around fifteen and i left that place after a few months with a rather bleak view of public ma schools and its practioners . Granted the shaolin do stuff reaks of fraudulent teaching and what not but in reality from reading this board and posters experiences ive come to realize what was being taught there wasnt much different than what you see at other more "legit schools"
The people were extremly petty, they handed out rank as long as you payed them and the teachers were delusional and liked to hear themselves talk. When i went in there i had some boxing under my belt and was at the time learning tkd on the side from a relative and i made an adult higher rank belt look bad because i happened to throw him as we were sparring. Immediately after that all the other higher ranked practioners looked down on me and woudl intentionally try to get rough during sparring to pay me back.
They didnt suceed lol but it still soured my opinion on them and the school so after about five months i left. i figured since i was able to get martial arts that worked from a relative for free why waste time trying again? So from then on to the time i was alittle over 20 i spent working on karate ,tkd and boxing with my relative.
After a period of time my relative like pretty much every member of the family fell sick and couldnt train very hard much anymore so i had to go seek people elsewhere to work out with, Grudge was memtioned so i walked on over an introduced myself.
Honestly i wasnt sure what to expect from the MMA gym , My breif experience with martial artist as csc left me with bad opinion of public ma schools and i had relatively kept to myself with my training afterwards so obviously i expected the worse as far as the character of the people and instructors went.
I was pleasantly suprised! The coaches were some of the nicest down to earth people ive met and there wasnt a single jerk, idiot, @sshole in the gym.
They had a zero tolerance policy for people like that and would throw anyone out who tried to act in that manner.
They were also cool with you coming in with experience from other styles because they had backrounds in TMA themselve so were open minded.
What i liked most besides the pleasant environment was during open gym if i had a theory or idea or something like that i wanted to try one of the amatuer fighters would glove up with me and try it to see if it worked or not.
Thankfully through that i found out that my sheltered private training previously wasnt crap and largely worked. They felt my stand up was good and just need to fine tune it a bit and i was good to go.
I think the two biggest things i got from it was thati learned not all martial artists are not all delusional weirdos and i was able to as i find out that what i had been training for years previously wasnt largely thoeoretical and unpractical.
I kept training my two tradtional arts, still do to this day. Why broke whats not fixed after all? But for the rest of my life i would prefer training at an mma gym. I feel i can just continue my karate and tkd on my own and just bring it into a gym to pressure test it since thats all thats important. on top of that i can train what they teach to round out my skill set and improve myself as martial artist.
I still do have an interest in kung fu to be honest particuarly the southern arts like hung gar or bak mei but i am still vary wary of wasting my time going through the mess i did with Csc years back and i feel that mma is a general safer and smarter route to go. Lifes to short after all to waste your time. Might as well use it wisely.