Genuinely, in non academic competition often the best way to “beat” an opponent is to change the rules

Examples of this that are well understood are regulatory capture, where group A convinces a more powerful group B to enforce a new constraint on all competitors to group A. Generally the constraint is a marginal impediment to group A and so “levels the playing field” *wink*

So the idea that there’s some pure form of rhetoric that is actually worth practicing, given that human conflict (from the minor to the major) is rarely to never solved via this mechanism (even in formal legal proceedings) - it’s not clear what is actually being learned here

Other than later in life realizing how formal debate has almost no application and it’s all about how you refine and evaluate your own arguments.