As a homeschool graduate who used Saxon through high school, I agree with your assessment. The one issue I took with Saxon is that the original example problems when introducing a new concept were too easy. I was able to grok how to solve the problems for the first 5-10 lessons, without actually understanding the principles behind them. When the problems grew harder and actually required applying the concepts, I'd have to backtrack a couple of weeks. A bit of a bugger, but all in all I liked Saxon a lot.