Will post my re-analysis later. Was finishing reading Alfred Kee's book. I have all three English books now - Alex Chiu ( I bought his physical book; contents identical to online book), Jack Chiu, and Alfred Kee. Alex says he read Wild Crane. He read it on his own, without guidance/assistance from a school, or lineage. Jack Chiu (no relation to alex), does not mention his sources. Alfred Kee also mentions Wild Crane, but he talks about his "lineage". So he must have some masters, elders, who passed down their interpretation of Wild Crane.
Is this similar to Tai Chi lineages? Your Yang Tai Chi may come from the Yang Cheng Fu lineage, or from the branch of his older brother, Yang Shao Hou. I wonder how may lineages claim to interpret Wild Crane.
I would guess every lineage related to WWG.
Not because Wild Crane text is very good practically, yet historically its situated in a position that makes it difficult to go around if someone hopes to present the system.
I don't have interest in Wild Crane. I had some time ago, but from what I have seen so far there is very little we can learn from there that would be better then what we can already find in open sources and with practice, but I understand why people found they had to connect that to present a teaching.
Similar to how they had to include King Wen if they talk about the Zhouyi. Even though its more then likely, he just recorded what was a general oral tradition at the time, similar to how dream meanings were passed from village to village in my country... They were recorded by authors and we value them for it, but it wasn't their invention. Yet his written material became so important for what develop afterwards that we should acknowledge it, for both of them really.
From what I have studied so far, it seems the Five Arts work differently then most metaphysical or spiritual systems I"m aware of. Usually there is either a person or a group of people that receive the "flow", they get influx of light and understanding and they begin something worth bringing here. That would be Naropas texts for Tibetan Buddhism, The Zohar for Kabbalah, Korzybskis general semantics for neurolinguistics and others.
Then generations after that people take light from that and expand it, yet we can't really learn these systems without the places the light was anchored at.
In the Five Arts these places seems missing in the open. From what seems to be the case, they were anchored in closed schools and lineages and were never accessible by everyone.
That is not a good idea, in my view, but its the way it is and we align with that.
It means there are 2 ways if we want to get to the spiritual levels of a system(and that in general means to the levels it works very well at). One is to hope a lineage or school that actually had clarity and influx of light somewhere in its practitioners will open what it has arrived at. The other is to keep practicing and it will happen with time.
Both have problems. First case you can't really know if that was distorted, how much of it you will receive and how much will be hidden even there etc. Not to mention how few these schools would be in comparison to how many will be even worse then the open material. The second one has the problem that some of these just need more then a lifetime to actually realize/arrive at.
So how to study this systems... Keep reading stuff and use the good info out there and that is the best we can do I think. As of course this goes beyond just WWG, as that seems to be the situation in more or less all of the Five Arts systems.