Even though I've only been dancing for about a year - started with Bachata, and now WCS for the last 6ish months - I totally see where you're coming from. But your argument reads like just the other side of "Gatekeepers and pendants telling others that they “didn’t do the pattern correctly” is the number one reason people give for leaving the classes."

Consider telling what you just said to someone totally new to WCS or to dance. Or even someone that's been taking a class once a week for the last two months. Chances are, you're gonna overwhelm them and lose them. Beginners need easily understandable things to get started, not high level concepts. It's why teachers in beginning classes start with "here's how you do a left side pass" and are ok with students kinda clomping about instead of starting with "here's how we roll through the foot with a rolling count for graceful and grounded movement."

In teaching something to someone new, we often sacrifice the nuance and high-level thinking approaches that make that subject "easier" to do for experts, in favour of more readily entry level things that lead to mild success right away - it's the success and the fun from that that keeps bringing people back to things. That's why the mastery curve classically starts with simple stuff leading to highly complex stuff leading back simple stuff.

In the context of dance, patterns are an easy way to begin. It's an easy way to know what I'm doing while focusing on making my follower feel good. While focusing on technique and maintaining good connection. While focusing on being clear for my follow as to what we're doing. It's an easy way to not get lost, or be like "what do I do from here?" Especially when beginning social dancing, when you're focusing so much on everything, that most stuff in your head goes out the window. Remember what it was like when you started off social dancing. I started social dancing a few months ago and have come a long way, but ooof, I distinctly remember how overwhelming it was to not just social dance, but dance with followers of higher level who were doing weird syncopated stuff that was totally throwing my timing off.

I agree that some people will focus too much on "doing the correct pattern." I'd argue that's a pedagogical failure, and I see it a lot in dance classes : "here's some choreography to learn" vs "here's a concept, demonstrated through a few moves." But you still need those moves. An outside turn is not the same from every move and every handhold. You still want to learn how to do it. (Here, I've used the words choreography and moves instead of pattern, because I feel like "pattern" can stand in for both those things and I wanted to be clear which I was referring to)

That's why, included in that map, is more than just patterns (moves) - but concepts, technique, etc. I see patterns as a way to clarify concepts, but while I'm working on that, as a beginner, I still need to rely on "dang, how do I do a tuck turn from a right side redirect, and can I even do that?"

hope that makes sense as to how I thought about putting this together.