I'm apparently in the stage of blaming bits of myself. Why do I have trouble with that one move near the end of the pinan nidan kata in karate? Because of my ankles; I can't bend through them (dorsiflex) worth a damn, for structural reasons that will probably never change very much. It's a legitimate problem -- but the next, more adult step is to say, okay, so how do I work around it? And that's the harder part. It isn't enough to point out the problem if I don't find a way to solve it, within my own personal operating parameters.

I hadn't thought about absence of a blaming-others habit as being one of the appeals of non-traditional students, but you're right, that's definitely part of it. (Mostly I chalked my preference for them up to the fact that they had chosen to be in class, and were probably paying their own money for it, which meant they valued what they'd come to do. Some of the younger students did, too, but a lot were there just because their parents had paid for it, and never gave it much thought beyond that.)