Sure your NDB hold might be spot on, but in the real world, exactly how many of those are you going to do. I've never had to do one in real life
Don't know about the US, but they're not particularly uncommon in the UK.
However, no one actually cares one bit whether the hold is accurate, so long as you stay at the correct level and in roughly the right bit of airspace. The only time anyone cares about the accuracy of a hold (to any degree, let alone to the degree that JAR IR examiners require) is on an IR test. In fact, at my home airfield, ATC can't even see you in the hold because there's too much radar clutter directly overhead the airfield.
FFF
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