My response in the comments section:
In the first part of the post, you rip into the idea that every couple of months, the "new secret" comes along and it's supposed to revolutionize American distance running, then it invariably fails. Then you go into detail about how you and you alone know what's wrong with American distance runners and you have this concept that's going to revolutionize American distance running.
This is just the next training fad. Of course mechanics are important, and improving them should be a goal of all runners, but improving knee drive fractionally or whatever a runner's issue is is not going to make a 28:30 10k runner a 26:30 10k runner just by itself.
It's wrong to focus one's training purely along the lines of interval work, or doing 90% tempo running, or simply jogging 2 hours a day every day, or purely on running with "textbook" form.
I remember reading about some of Jack Daniels' studies on efficiency. He showed that even the best coaches in the country couldn't watch 5 runners doing intervals and pick out the most "efficient" runners. In other words, good form and inefficiency can go together, and "bad form" (or what looks bad to us) could be very efficient. The basketball shooting analysis is not an accurate comparison at all.
Likewise, runners tend to be the most efficient at the paces their race requires. Again, in a Daniels study, Frank Shorter was found to be more efficient running 5min/mile than he was at any other pace (including 6min/mile and 7min/mile). Unsurprising for a marathoner, right? Along the same lines, Jim Ryun was found to be the most efficient at 4min/mile- even more efficient than at 5min/mile. Can we conclude, then, that there was something wrong with his form if he was not very efficient at the pace of 5min/mile, even though he was a 3:51.1 miler?
Don't get me wrong, form is very important. But it's not 1) the be-all end all to success and 2) it's not like basketball where there's one ideal way for optimum success. Of course we should strive to become more efficient as runners. But nothing is static- if you change the ways your knees drive, it's going to change the way you do other things in a thousand minute ways. Fixing a high-schooler's form, too, isn't the same as taking a 13:20 5k runner and making minute adjustments.
I don't think there is a catch-all reason for "what is wrong with American distance running." I think that like most broad phenomena, there are dozens of subtle reasons that combine in hard-to-observe ways. To attempt to say "nope, guys, THIS time, we've got it!" is reductionist at best and academically dishonest at worst. It's one thing to fix huge fundamental flaws in a developing runner's stride. Striving to be "textbook perfect" after a runner has already gotten most everything down is a waste of time. Like all the other training fads you put down in the first part of your post, form is not the be-all-end-all. It is, like the other essential aspects of training that have gone through periods of gross overemphasis, another piece of a very complex puzzle.
But then again, that's not quite as convenient as a catch-all, is it?
