a) the coaches don't like it; the circuits are very time-consuming to draw, the lesson plans that SC are providing are more complex (and less understandable) than the ones that I had to develop in Teacher's College, and that I never use anymore as a teacher!
b) The circuits are actually designed to review, reinforce, and introduce. The program divides the rink into teach, review, and practice; in the teach phase, you teach new skills; in the review phase, you review the new and solidify the old; and in the practice, you practice the old and the new.
b(ii) You do have to teach the circuit-of-the-day and with that day's focus (balance, agility, control, etc). There's not supposed to be flexibility to just move on; this is supposed to prevent coaches from "skipping" or not adequately teaching some areas, leading to gaps in the skater's progression, and, also the circuits are supposed to interlock to teach/reinforce/etc.
c) it's less restrictive in some ways than the old Canskate system. With the new, you can move forward on, say, jumps if you're succeeding there, but, continue to work on, say, forward edges at a "lower" level. Traditionally, you worked on the skills at your badge level,and you couldn't move on to a new badge level and higher order skills until all of the skills at your badge level were mastered- which led to frustration for the kid who got stuck. Now, they can move on in some areas while continuing to work on the weaker aspects.
d) it's more efficient in that traditionally coaches assessed for "passing" every time they looked at the kid. Now, assessments are done on an assessment day, by a designated coach for that session, and that helps with consistency; we're now going to comps that are skated against "the book" which means that standards (hopefully) will get more consistent.
It's got good and bad. The key thing though is that Canskate isn't designed to just produce figure skaters - it is also intended to produce strong hockey, etc skaters. Biggest problem is that it is overly complex, coaches don't want to do it, and there is a lot of resistance to change ... however, SC clubs will be required to do it. Don't know, this is the 2nd "relaunching" of Canskate that I've seen since my kids started skating ...