Originally Posted by
Faux Newbie
NUMBERS ADDED ABOVE FOR EASE OF REFERENCE.
Number 2 is impossible without knowing something about other fighting methods one encounters. To know the completeness of one's system, one is examining how complete it is against other techniques that exist or have existed or could exist.
Fighting is the combination of more than one person with other people, martial method is seeking to understand it within a framework that allows one to impose on that combination for favorable results, it is not ignoring the other person. What you describe requires what you refer to as making life difficult to fulfill it.
Know yourself, know your enemy. This requires familiarity with other systems. One does not need to train all methods, but there is no merit in avoiding knowledge of them.
Much of kung fu has similar engines, but how those engines can be applied require knowledge of what an opponent may do. I am not familiar of a single system developed worth mention that was not developed by someone who clearly had familiarity with other systems. To mimic the system and not the founder is to rely on that which the founder themselves found only partially reliable in their day, else they would not have honed a new system. If they were alive today, they would likely have expanded on the system based on new information, just as they did in life.