Re: Regrading grabs in Aikido...
The problem of how you get from basic grabbing of wrist and forearms to prevent people accessing their weapons to shoulder grabs with no apparent tactical advantage is a matter of the tendency of practitioners to come up with ways to apply technique to different scenario regardless of how ridiculous it is in reality. Meaning once the context of the origin of the art is forgotten many out of context techniques start to develop for artistic sake.
It becomes more of an exercise as to how many ways can X technique be applied. The "is it tactically sound mindset" becomes secondary and the art as a whole degrades over time as other promoters of the "art" try to be creative in expressing the classical techniques. In the end the context is lost and all you have is an art with lots of "style" with no real substance.
It looks pretty, but you can't fight with it. It's an interesting technique, but nobody would grab you like that in real life. ETC.