Hi Steelspy. Agree with everything here. I'm not a student, but I supervise students in externships focused on stuttering, and have seen the changes in the past 20+ years. Unfortunately there's still a lot of inadequate speech therapy for stuttering out there, but there are also more and more SLPs who actually learn how to provide helpful therapy. Treatment these days - skilled treatment, from a specialist -- is a lot different that it was even ten years ago. There is less of a focus on fluency as the endpoint, and more on understanding and addressing the reactions and responses to stuttering that maintain the struggle. Good SLPs who work with stuttering are trained in cognitive-behavioral therapies to address the anxiety, social anxiety, rumination, and other unhelpful mental gymnastics that come from living with a stutter. Dealing with that stuff usually results in more relaxed, forward-moving stuttering that allows you to stay spontaneous in your speech, and effective in communication, without avoiding words, and without needing to employ a lot of "tricks" to get through it. HTH.