In the world of most traditional martial arts there exists an organisational hierarchy built on the foundation of affiliations. A foundation which is weak and responsible for splitting and crumbling many organisations and indirectly affecting the martial arts itself. Every organisation has a headquarters, let's assume it is in Japan. Now it has branches in many countries, let's assume India is one branch. So there will be a chief instructor for India, who is paying affiliation fees yearly to be associated with the organisation. Now other instructors under him will again pay affiliation fees for being given a city or state etc as their area to teach. In many organisations it's not just yearly affiliation fees but other things like registering a certain number of students on the website for a price, and lots more. All these costs then make instructors try more and new ways to earn money. Some even make it compulsory for all students to buy a whole training kit li...
The market in general in any industry or line of work will always cater to what we ask from it. Like we want bigger fruits and that ends up use of excessive fertilizers etc to grow bigger fruits. Similarly if parents or students keep wanting new belts then not all but many will bend to that demand and over time the belts will have no value in general. Belts are not a measure of how many months or years you have been training but a measure of how much you have grown. So just because you have been going to a class for a few years doesn't mean you should be a certain belt. With our fast paced lives today, students are not able to dedicate the same amount of time that students a few generations before did. So that obviously slows down the growth, this itself is enough to actually slow down the belt grading process. We are all different, we learn at different speeds, we have different preferences etc. Some may love cardio based drills, some may love sparing or some ma...