I don't believe having a generic negative opinion about an organization should be interpreted as personal insult to folks who are or have been members of that organization. I was a member of the ACA for many years, but ended up stopping 30 years ago when I realized that it was mostly a dues-sucking bureaucracy irrelevant to my paddling life, and the only thing it was doing for me was sending me an increasingly kayakized and othewise irrelevant magazine I could buy on my own.
Same with the American Bar Association.
I started out as a self-taught child using the goon stroke, which has a child-like appeal. I read about the J-stroke, but had a hard time executing it at first because it was literally too stressful and tiring on my shaft wrist and forearm. Of course, I was using a paddle much too long, holding the paddle with YC's lower hand death grip, and using what I now would call a pushaway at the end of the stroke. The pushaway-J is a Satanic, momentum killing, forearm crippling obscenity that belongs only in the Tower of London torture chamber.
Eventually, over many years, I self-learned a smooth thumbs-down correction that was some sort of combination of C-stroke, pitch stroke and an in-water forward loaded slice (Canadian) return—I didn't know any of that terminology then—that was comfortable and effective.
I also began my whitewater canoe career in California using a nine foot double blade Carlisle paddle in a Mad River Explorer. That was another childish obscenity that I will ban myself from further discussing in this particular thread.
As an adult beginning in 1980, I took formal and informal paddling lessons from some of the top recognized paddlers in the West, East and nationally, none of whom were ACA (or BCU) certified—other than informally with ACA mega-guru Tom Foster—until I took flatwater freestyle lessons in 2009 and 2010, where the thumb-down proficiency seemed to be assumed. Now, even the Freestyle Committee has left the ACA in favor of the USCA. John Berry and others have told me it wasn't worth their money or time to keep up with ACA certification requirements. In my opinion then and now, their lack of a piece of ACA paper did not diminish their paddling or pedagogical bona fides or effectiveness.
Aside from learning an intuitive repertoire of thumb-down, single-sided correction strokes, I consider my biggest breakthroughs in becoming a decent paddler was learning cross-forward strokes and heeling the canoe to turn. Both self-learned by observation of advanced paddlers.
I will grudgingly concede, as one who has personally blundered through every canoe technique obscenity available, that if my only goal were to get a total newbie through his or her first couple of hours of canoeing, I might suggest the goon stroke. However, we all must choose our informational and polemical niche on canoe forums. I choose to be a fundamentalist Stringer-Mason-Berry-Galt advocate of single blade, single-sided correction propulsion of open canoes using efficient strokes in all four canoe quadrants—from a centralized seat in solo canoes—which will never include the goon stroke as the most efficient means of regular forward travel.
Other than adopting that pedagogical and polemical 'puter persona, I'm an infinitely flexible softie, and don't really care what other folks do in a canoe as long as they enjoy it.