Regular acro is a building block necessary before any meaningful UPRT. It's maintaining an oriented picture of the world with respect to yourself now, a picture (or several) for the future, and acting on that picture with appropriate control inputs.
Doing that (which in itself can be disorienting and overwhelming for many) in a planned manner with some time to sort out the pieces in your mind, is a prerequisite to doing the same except with no planning, and suddenly being thrown into the situation. That's a hundred times more disorienting and overwhelming.
It's like, you do a rectangular course over a farm field with a student before starting into circuits, right? (Well, maybe not, I don't know what you do in Europe, but go with me here.) A circuit has all the elements of a rectangular course, plus so much more. You give them a chance to learn those elements, before throwing the rest at them at the same time. You wouldn't say that the 2 maneuvers shouldn't be conflated because one doesn't have "the real world challenges" of the other. Or, say, learning how to just track a course at a level altitude before introducing ILS'es...
Last edited by Vessbot; 3rd Dec 2020 at 13:39.