Once again it is my own personal opinion that the problem with lack of undersatnding and ability to do wheel landings is instructors that do not fully understand the subject they are supposed to teach. Maybe that is why they get paid peanuts?
Possibly, but it's a bit of a generalisation. Most of my tailwheel flying has been in the mountains, taught by career instructors with more experience than I'll ever have (close to 30000hrs tailwheel time in one case) and even with them I've never been taught wheel landings. Admittedly you'd be pretty nuts to do a wheel landing on a sloping mountain airstrip, but they've never felt the need to take me to a flat airfield to practice.
Their view is that if I've been trained to fly by them, I can probably cope and they're happy to let me take the aeroplane where I want. And, as I mentioned above, I found that after doing the mountain flying courses with them I didn't have any problems doing wheel landings on my own.