Regardless of skill or experience it seems riders who have a regular parking lot practice routine seem to be okay with what I'm doing. The objections seem to come from people who don't do much of it.
Not so. I, for one, have a fairly regular slow-speed practice routine, and take the civilian course taught by motor cops periodically, as I did on Saturday.
Partially as a result of that experience, I
strongly object to your opinion that slow speed practice, particularly balance and figure 8 practice, is adequate preparation for higher-speed riding.
As for specific exercises, it looks from the links you've posted that you are familiar with many of the common motor cop exercises--regular and offset cone weaves, lane-to-lane U-turns, the W-shaped Eliminator pattern, and so forth. The maximum-effort braking practice, done at speeds starting at 15 mph and working up to 25-30 mph, is useful (though the instructors added that braking practice at higher speeds than we could attain in the lot were even more useful for integrating proper muscle memory for braking into the rider).
One of the exercises that you might wish to try, that I believe has some bearing on riding on, you know, actual roads, is the brake-and-swerve exercise. Object avoidance is useful, after all. The instructor places two cones 10 feet apart and 10 feet in front of himself, and stands well downrange (a couple hundred feet) of the rider. At the instructor's signal, the rider heads straight at the instructor. As the rider draws near to the instructor, he signals either a stop, or a right or left swerve. This way it's a surprise for the rider, who must react quickly, and separate the action of braking from the action of swerving in the space between the cones and the instructor. Cone distance is decreased and speeds are increased as the rider develops skill.
Note that none of this does a damn thing to help with judgment, and is thus an incomplete part of the picture that makes up good riding.
