I echo the previous two posters.
I rember a teacher when I was starting describing the progression of Aikido. First you think about techniques, then you do the techniques without thinking, finaly forget techniques. How's that relevant? I think the aim of aikido is to develop Aiki so you can apply it spontaneously without regard to technique, this mean unfortunately while we are learning through aikido techniques they often seem ineffective. The temptation is we can supliment with these percived effective techniques from other arts and still call it aikido. To me this can be a distraction from the higher goal of learning Aiki because we are not using those techniques towards developing Aiki but to fight better in the short term, and that becomes our goal
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Don't get me wrong I don't think we shouldn't be martial, fight well, or train other arts. Just we need to know what we are aiming for and not get so side tracked that we head off on a different path. Of course we all have different goals
