Aikido is not a fighting art. The founder of Aikido was a hardcore aikijujutsu guy and soldier who supposedly decided to pacify himself after fighting in wars and took some of the concepts from aikijujutsu and added a bunch of pseudo-spiritual stuff to it. Its supposed to be a physical embodiment of a way of life, i.e. harmonizing with your opponent in all aspects of life, seeing things from their point of view, then guiding them to your point of view. That's it at its core. The idea that aikido is a martial combat system is fundamentally flawed.
A lot of people misunderstand the differences between the various Japanese martial arts. Fundamentally there were combat styles (the -jutsus) and some of them were turned into philosophies and/or sports (the -dos).
For example, traditional Japanese jujutsu (not to be confused with 20th century BJJ which is tangentially related) is a full-featured combative system that teaches strikes, locks, breaks, throws, take downs, and even some groundwork, though going to the ground in actual combat is a quick way to die so its not the focus. Traditional jujutsu is still taught today but you have to look for it.
Related to jujutsu is aikijujutsu which uses jujutsu techniques adapted to fit sword stances and movements. So you wind up with very open and flowing circular movements versus traditional jujutsu which uses circles when appropriate but also uses direct lines of attack a lot, and also will use a circular movement and then cut through it with a linear movement to increase the damage of the strike or momentum of the throw/break. Aikijujutsu did this because hand-to-hand combat was viewed as about as useful then as hand-to-hand combat is now when people carry weapons -- a fallback that shouldn't happen, but if it did you should know a few techniques that are easy to remember because they are based on the same movements you train with using your swords. And then aikijujutsu grew even further into its own separate art from there.
In fact both jujutsu and aikijujutsu are offshoots of a much older art known as kumi uchi which was samurai grappling with armor on -- basically a way to grab your opponent and thrown them off balance/to the ground so you can stab them with pointy things.
To see a true depiction of traditional Japanese aikijujutsu see this video and notice the movements make perfect sense in the context of the society in which they were created. Many are defenses against surprise attacks by seated swordsmen supposedly sitting with you to discuss peace, so they trained to be prepared to defend themselves appropriately.
So Aikido came from aikijujutsu which is a kind-of offshoot of early jujutsu. Judo was a similar offshoot of jujutsu (not aikijujutsu) that aimed to make a competitive sport with some philosophical elements to it. Basically a way to allow you to "go all out" against an opponent within a structured rule system to hopefully prevent serious damage. And teach a basic philosophy of life with it.
Karate is a bit different since it was an offshoot/formalization of a loose collection of techniques in Okinawa known simply as te, meaning hand. These techniques were a way for the Okinawans to help defend themselves against invaders, especially Japanese. The early techniques were much more primitive than what is seen today, focused on dirty effectiveness rather than clean and pretty. Most of what passes as "kroddy" today is virtually indistinguishable from "take-your-do", a bunch of crap taught by people who don't even fully understand the arts but are happy to take your money in exchange for some cult-like bullshit.
Traditional martial arts have a tremendous amount of information encoded in the original katas and a lot of people misunderstand how katas work. They also misunderstand the ideas of stance and this gets reinforced by "kroddy" teaching these huge static stances where you drop into a stance and stay there. It's ridiculous. A true fighting art will teach you to move your ass around a lot in short quick movements, and each movement has a transition point and that transition point is the stance. So a stance is a means to transition from one position to another. It is not supposed to be some static fighting position you dig out of the ground and hold forever, it is a dynamic split-second point in a movement that forms a very strong base for a follow-on movement.
For example, compare these two traditional karate stances. Stance 1 and Stance 2. They are the "same" stance but they are implemented differently. It looks stupid from the outside if you don't know what they are for. And I would say the former is "less correct" because it appears to be very static. But look at the second stance and then watch the footwork in this BJJ shoulder throw clip. The "static stance" from the karate clip is actually a very dynamic "hip cocking" maneuver that "kroddy" teachers never teach because they don't understand it themselves. It cocks the hips for the throw.
Now compare that to this aikijujutsu footwork and see the fully open version of that kind of footwork.
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