Hi, Billy.
Yeah, don't think I'd go beach timeshares with Rogan, either. When talking about the applicability of arts, whether it's WC or something from GD, questions have to be asked.
No question, you have to know what you're training for, another gripe I have with my first school – Is it an art, a sport, exercise, self-defense, battlefield combat? We've all encountered schools that claim to be all of these. To my mind, a baseball bat is a great weapon for self-defense, simple, don't have to load it, multiple hitting surfaces. But you won't learn to fight with one in a streetfight, by playing baseball. A lot of traditional training seems to have you running the bases, rather than, say, hitting a heavy bag with the bat.
No question, the ring is good for showing a lot of stuff, but even the Octagon allows stuff that wouldn't fly in the real world, like chasing someone on your butt because you want to grapple, not stand up with them. Or planning to wear someone down over ten minutes. Or just punching them repeatedly in the head, with your fist.

I also don't think we can generalize, but so much, about WC, or really any art. How many WC federations are there, now? My first school was Yuen Kay San (sp?), and they told us that Yip Man was a conniving cheat who got thrown out of the system, and if we ever encountered Yip Man people we'd beat them so bad we'd change their past. Charles Chi had learned from from Yip Man people, and I'm fully confident that he'd beat my first teacher so bad his dog back home would drop a turd in the shape of a praying Jesus.
You can't talk about WC or whatever like you'd say '10cc of pennicillin,' it always comes back to the person doing it. See also, systems of strength training, of massage, of acupuncture, all of which I do professionally, all of which I've observed a myriad of permutations in students of the same teacher. There’s probably guys out there who do WC in a manner I’d think of overly stiff, but they succeed by running up on people with the chain punch and have learned or intuited how to deal with the defenses coming in.
Chi's observation that WC was lacking strength and power was not a little transgressive, itself. His WC 'was not of the mainstream,' as they say in the movies, but at the end of the day, I'm not the member of the WC Clan, or any clan, I'm a guy who's genetically better suited to be a poet than a hand-to-hand fighter, who doesn't want to just roll over in a physical confrontation.