The "Walz" is not for building primary skills (i.e. in our case Software Development or in their case Carpentry). It is assumed that carpenters doing it are already quite skilled in their respective profession. The reason of the "Walz" is to teach self reliance, soft skills and to round out ones primary skills by being exposed to practices of their craft that have evolved/developed differently from those they learned during their apprenticeship.

In short the goal is to become a "Master" which in the german vocational tradition originally meant having your own shop and not needing to be an employee any longer (so in our case to become a founder).

I think the internet undermines these goals, because, well IMHO it is becoming more and more a gigantic echo chamber (we all read the same blogs/books, admire the same persons, use remarkably similar tools etc.)

I think it is astounding that a lot of very smart people assume that currently hip and promoted best development practices, say for a Web 2.0 whatever platform are relevant for other areas (e.g embedded, big iron, medical, aeronautic, finance) because there is not much evident push back in the blog sphere from practitioners in these spheres... which AFAIK is more a result of these people tending to much less likely to blog or work on open source software, than of the universal applicability of said practices (and if the push back, the results I have seen so far have been highly embarrassing for the hipster crowd).