What are the valid criticisms of traditional training that natural horsemanship identified?

Natural horsemanship identified genuine and important problems with traditional training approaches that its critique has been largely right about, and the improvements in horse welfare and training effectiveness that have followed from addressing these problems represent the movement's most significant practical contribution to the broader horse world. The most fundamental valid criticism is that force-based starting and training methods that rely on overwhelming the horse's resistance through restraint, pain, or exhaustion produce horses that have been subdued rather than trained — horses that comply when the force is present or recently remembered but that revert to resistance when the force is absent or when the horse's accumulated resentment finds an opportunity to express itself. The production of horses that perform through fear rather than through understanding creates welfare problems and practical reliability problems that natural horsemanship correctly identified as stemming from the training method rather than from the horse's character. The traditional training world's tendency to attribute resistance and behavioral problems to the horse's stubbornness, bad attitude, or inherent difficulty — rather than to training gaps, pain, or communication failures — was a systematic misattribution that natural horsemanship correctly challenged by insisting that apparent disobedience was almost always a reasonable response to unreasonable circumstances rather than a character failing. The traditional training world's relative inattention to the horse's internal experience — its emotional state, its understanding, its willing participation — as legitimate training concerns was also a genuine oversight that natural horsemanship correctly identified as both ethically problematic and practically counterproductive. The improvements in colt starting quality — the normalization of quiet, understanding-based starting rather than forced breaking — is perhaps the most concrete positive change that natural horsemanship's critique of traditional training produced.