I have no interest in picking on Roy. I think what he is doing is great.
In terms of "aiki" as I currently understand it:
-the first requirement is that you have a "trained body" for internal power and internal skill - meaning that you have all of your lines of intent in balance - or you can think of it as you are managing all of he forces in your body in in 6 directions
-now, as I understand it, as long as your "trained body" is more well trained then the attacker, ALIVE vs static doesn't seem to make too much difference. I could be wrong. But in my limited experience when I am attacking freely Dan is basically ignoring me.
What seems to happen is that you touch them (or they touch your attacking hand/arm or somewhere else on your attacking body), your trained body is less of a trained body than the person you are punching (or trying to throw), and what happens is that the attackers center becomes instantly available/accessible. And none of what I wrote so far is aiki YET.
At that point - the person being attacked with the better trained body can instantly use "aiki" such that the attacker's body just starts giving up their center and has to desperately try to adjust. No amount of movement seems to help. It is too instant, and you feel like your body is kind of betraying your desire to hit the other person - or throw them (to keep things in line with the thread).
The only thing that helps is to try to start adjusting by managing your own contradictory forces (lines of intent in the 6 directions) in your own body and try to "get ahead" and "stay just ahead" of what the aiki defender is likely to do. So in a sense it's like grappling and aikido in that regard - but all of that adjustment and getting ahead and staying just ahead is all happening primarily internally as opposed to big external movements of should muscles, hip muscles, arms and legs, etc.
I think the idea here is that you get your own aiki going on, but realistically you also still have to train "positional dominance" like everyone else in grappling just in case they have better aiki than you do (you want to have the best chance of getting to use your aiki first where they are weakest relative to you).
So, I don't think LIVE training makes much difference when you have an extreme advantage in terms of body skills and aiki. However, there are enough people out there now teaching such things that "positional dominance" (which was never a bad thing to know well) is still critically important for grappling and defending against grappling. - and most people in aikido do not know it very well at all.
In the best of the aikidoTM dojos we typically learn to move very well in terms of hiding our bodies weaknesses relative to the attacker. (The worst - well are the worst for a reason!) The problem is that the moment you blow it - that grappler owns you. So people like Kevin, Roy, and many others (I was leaning there myself) thought well that's a major gap in my defense I need to close. This is not a bad thing - it's an awesome thing. Buy Roy's tapes!
Kevin if you want to make some money - make tapes of how aikido people can best establish "positional dominance" in all of the typical ways to let them practice their set ups. Just that. I'll buy it. Really.
In terms of tapes with aikido + grappling, it's interesting, but for me personally I am just not terribly interested in anyone else's kotegaeshi these days. Frankly, I like mine the best.
Rob