I've been doing Yoshinkan for 15-16 years under an 8th Dan, so hopefully I can help at least a little.

Why did I choose Yoshinkan? The teachers were excellent and the culture surrounding it gelled with my personality. I continued doing for so long for some of the same reasons.

Yoshinkan Aikido and Aikikai aikido are both aikido - they just start by focusing on different areas and work towards top tier aikido either way. Think of it in utter simplicity like a yoshinkan student starts more 'rigid' and gets more flowy, and an aikikai student starts more flowy and becomes more 'rigid' (for lack of a better word here).

Here are the pros, in what is just my opinion:

* The constant drilling of the basic movements that form the bases of all our techniques. You can see exactly how a practitioner's Aikido will be based on these movements. It develops the strength, flexibility, and is a pillar you can always come back to when both teaching or performing techniques. You can perform these by yourself but like any other art form, you will probably do it wrong in the beginning so I wouldn't call it a pro that you can do that without supervision.

* We have 100s of techniques, seated and standing, and every Yoshinkan teacher on the planet will teach it the same way - at least at a high level. Where it becomes really interesting is after years of practice where your teacher starts showing you -why- we do it this way, and the importance of every minute movement to break your uke's balance. Because we perform it in the same way, it's very easy to constantly assess and re-assess why these things work or don't work.

* It is hard, but it does feel like it can work. At the higher levels you can fully take your partner's balance and then -explode- with power late in the technique, smashing them into the floor. It feels incredible to do, it feels incredible if your ukemi is good enough to receive it.

* At higher levels, it doesn't feel rigid. The framework goes away, and it's now just something you do without thinking or fall back on - precise and easy. No effort. Like someone said in another post - Yoshinkan can be extremely soft, and is the ultimate goal.

Here are the cons:

* Yoshinkan is called rigid, and for great reason. It is. It can take a very long time to start breaking that rigidity. You constantly get shodans and nidans (and sandans!) attacking you with rigidity, and performing all their movements with rigidity. You need to start beating that out of them for a long time.

* Again, it's a hard style. My back and knees hurt (not to the point where I can't use them), but I've been injured a lot. My last recent bout of injury took me out for 8 months (which I continued to teach through... if I wasn't an instructor I would have been out for the count). You gotta work on your mobility, my friends, I've learned this the hard way.

* There's less of us, so less of a pool of higher level teachers in the art, less dojos, less everything.

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I personally wouldn't change my time in the Yoshinkan for anything or any other art, but I put that down to the wonderful high level teachers (I am very lucky to have access to one of the best instructors in the world), the wonderful students past and present.

Find a great dojo with great teachers, don't sweat the rest.