Ketsan

Either Aikido harmonises with the times or it dies out. Many of the Koryu schools died because they were seen as having little relevance and was replaced by the gendai arts. Now MMA has come along and the gendai arts are seen as having little relevance so they, from what I've seen, are dying out also.

In the future Aikido, Judo, Karate etc will be practiced by people, probably older than most martial artists and for the same kind of reasons people learn Koryu arts now. That's if the gendai arts survive at all.

I'm not hopeful. At the moment I get the sense within Aikido that the average age of a beginner is about 45, the few that start teaching will be 55-60 and their teaching career is only going to be about 15-20 years mostly spent teaching older people.
I think most Aikido dojo will be closed within the next 20-30 years. Judo seems to be kept bearly alive by teaching children and even Karate classes seem to be older people and young children these days.

This is just my experience. The other thing I've experienced is that you can drive past the local MMA or Thai boxing gym by where I live any time of day, any day of the week, from 9am to maybe 10pm and there are groups of young guys training while Aikido dojo are struggling to get enough students to pay the bills.

If we are not worried about if an Aikidoka can stop a Thai Boxer etc then we are not worried about the water rising around the neck of Aikido. Just because we see the question as irrelevent doesn't mean the potential student, who is the lifeblood of any art, thinks of it as irrelevent.

If a guy comes into a dojo worrying about being punched in the face and is shown three ways of dealing with a wrist grab we shouldn't be suprised when he goes to the Thai Boxing instructor who'll show him exactly what he's looking for and when he walks out of the Aikido dojo he takes the future of Aikido with him.

That's what it means.