Pretty much. Honors LC Math throws too much at students at once. Trigonometry yay fine... but then eventually you miss one class and suddenly your teacher is rattling on about dy/dx anf f-prime which makes absolutely no sense to you and then 2 days later oh hai it's Integration lets do that thing you didn't quite understand and do it completely backwards. Then lets throw probability and statistics at you to see what sticks. Slow it down a bit. Those things take a good chunk of time to grasp. The earlier the basics are taught the sooner you can teach the more complicated stuff, and have more time to focus on it, rather than throwing it all at students at the end of their 2nd level education.
I agree with what you say though, while I maintain there's nothing particularly difficult in the maths syllabus in this country I do think that it can be pretty daunting for someone who doesn't 100% get it. As you say, miss one day or two days and it's moved on. If students had some kind of reference point as to what each little branch was about it would be a lot easier to slip back into the fold.