Why Rocksmith 2014 Is NOT A Perfect Guitar Instructor

From The Manufacturer:
Join over 3 million people who have learned to play guitar with the award-winning Rocksmith method. Rocksmith becomes your personal guitar teacher as it monitors how you play, dynamically adjusts the difficulty to your skill level, and then slowly introduces more phrases and techniques until you’re playing your favorite songs note-for-note.

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I've been playing Rocksmith (Remastered) on and off for the last few weeks. I should say up-front that believe that the game has made me a better guitarist.  Any tool that encourages players to pick up their instruments is a win in my book!  Moreover, between the official DLC and the near-limitless amount of content via "Custom DLC," (songs with "charts" made by the community), you'd think this game would be guitar paradise, right?  Not exactly.  Here are 5 reasons why Rocksmith 2014 is NOT a perfect guitar instructor. 

1. All official DLC and most CDLC offer dynamic difficulty, meaning that the game's challenge can change with the player.  While I generally appreciate this feature, it isn't perfect.  I would often bounce between boredom and panic depending on which song I was playing (and which section of the song).  Moreover, the "reduced difficulty" sections sometimes offered chords / fingerings that that seemed harder to me than just playing a "CAGED" shape chord.  I guess it makes sense if you are a "total beginner," but I am not.
2. It's nice that the game makes recommendations about how to improve your playing for a given song.  The problem, though, is that these recommendations are also often imperfect.  For example, the game often recommends lessons that I had either already completed, or that were irrelevant to a song (e.g. recommending "chords 101" for a song that didn't have explicit chord shapes in the chart).
3. The "riff repeater" (which allows you to break songs into bite-sized sections for easier practicing) is a great tool for working on particularly difficult sections and riffs.  The problem, however, is that you can't break down a song note-for-note.  In other words, if only 1/2 of a given section is giving you trouble in the riff repeater, you can't focus on just that.  This is compounded by the fact that the repeater speeds up a section after a single successful completion (which is far from ideal, see point 4)!
4.  Point 3 wouldn't be as much of an issue if it weren't fairly easy to trick the game into thinking you played a note when you didn't.  There are limits to what you can get away with, of course, but this leniency combined with the allowance of "late" notes is a recipe for sloppy playing.  Rocksmith would praise playing that I would be embarrassed to present live, let alone have on a record.  In short, is up to the player to set their own tolerance for rhythmic issues, bum notes, etc.
1. In other words, rhythm and individual note volume are both fairly easy to fudge.
5. All of this is to say nothing of the player's technique (i.e. the way the player interacts with the guitar to produce the notes the game is asking for), which the game can't really measure.

In a perfect world, everyone who was interested in guitar (or any instrument) would have a well-qualified instructor to help them on their musical journey.  An instructor could to provide more focused feedback, address issues of technique, and even (potentially) help a student make connections in the music world.  With that being said, lessons can be expensive, and not all instructors are created equal.  

Ultimately, since we don't live in that world, Rocksmith is a reasonable alternative (for guitar and bass players, at least).  I wouldn't be surprised if a generation of guitar players cite this very game as one of their inspirations (not unlike how Guitar Hero and Rock Band drew people to the instrument in the last console cycle).  As I said at the start of this post: "any tool that encourages players to pick up their instruments is a win in my book."